Did the Windows Phone 7 Bomb In the US? 609
Thorfinn.au writes "Microsoft's new smartphone platform is off to what could be considered a slower start than expected in North America. That's according to The Street, which has released a report saying that the company sold some 40,000 units on its first day on the market.
Early sales numbers from other phone platform launches include Apple's estimated 500,000 iPhones being snatched up during its launch weekend in 2007, and a million and a half G1 Android phones being bought up by T-Mobile subscribers in the phone's first six months." Do you know anyone with one of these phones? Me either.
If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
Why flush money down a losing venture until it starts to see a return? Because they can. And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming that WP8 will magically be a success, with, as you say, "25% of the market". What are the reasons to think that? It's not like WP7 is the first or second of Microsoft's forays into phones -- just look at the aptly named WinCE or the recent Microsoft Kin flop.
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capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
Man i would like to be a capitalist. Because then i can.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes really hardly surprising, and I was hoping for it, not because I wish Microsoft evil, but after years of dreadful ies on the desktop at least in the emerging mobile sektor webkit and its html5 implementation has become more or less the current defacto standard, so people finally can settle for a decent webapp programming experience. And then wham 3 years late Microsoft comes with its newest version of the os and tries to shove IE7 down the web developers throats. I have yet to meet a single web developer who was excited about the browser in WinMobile 7.
If Microsoft had gotten its way then we would have had ie6 all over again in the mobile sector, where a significant portion had a browser which had the latest standards in and stubborn Microsoft users wanted to see the latest whizbang features on their rotten browser without even thinking about installing an alternative. We have been there the last 10 years, and I really do not want history to repeat itself!
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Informative)
I will bother, because it is a fact that mobile ie in Windows mobile 7 is in the core an ie7 with some bugfixing backports from ie8, so slightly better than ie7 but worse than ie8 with probably a different error behavior in many issues between both versions. And I am not making this up, this is the official statement from Microsoft!
Believe it or not but you can read that up in the blogs of Microsofts mobile division!
Microsoft has done that in the past as well, mobile ie 6.5 was in fact an ie 5.5 engine with some ie6 backports, needless to say this browser was a desaster bugwise, different bugs than both ie 5.5 and ie6 with some carried over from ie6 and some from 5.5 and add to that a bunch of its own bugs.
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That turns out not to be the case - you can get Opera for the iPhone [opera.com].
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends, what is the long game? US companies have the unhealthy opinion of "What do you do for me next quarter?", but if the strategy is "Where do I want to be in 15 years?" (Europe) or "Where do I want to be in 50 years?" (Asia), then those losses are short term. And if you think the future is going to be some kind of media appliance over the next 10 - 15 years, yeah, you've lost a bunch of money on the first two generations, but the experience they've gained for the next 5 generations is invaluable.
I recently bought a 360. I used to play at my friends house, but as we've gotten older and they've gotten married/had kids or moved elsewhere...
Why did I buy a 360 over a Wii or PS3? Because that's what my friends had. Most of the people I know who bought Wii's seemed to have lost interest in the machines. Most use it more to stream Netflix than play games these days. And very few of my friends had a PS3 and most who did also had a 360.
Now I know those numbers don't hold up on a global scale. Xbox has not been that popular outside of the US.
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I didn't even know it was out yet. I guess I've mostly ignored the Win7 articles for a while now though, and wasn't psyched for it. I moved from years of Windows Mobile phones to Android a couple of months ago.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen the ads, but in classic Microsoft fashion they're marketing the operating system with little to no emphasis on what phone you'd buy to get it or what carriers' retail stores will stock it. Say what you want about Apple, but no one was ever confused about what an iPhone was or where to get one.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
You better bring something that no one else has.
Exactly. You can't release a new phone that lacks device encryption for secure Exchange connections, static IP for WiFi, multitasking, cut and paste, and Flash support [infoworld.com] in the current market. Two or three years ago? Sure. But not now.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:4, Informative)
WP7 doesn't even have a sockets API. You're expected to use HTTP for everything.
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Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:4, Funny)
So you get the hardware out there and then release incremental software improvements as you develop them, slowly but surely catching up to the cutting edge.
Hey, it worked with the Zune, didn't it? Oh, wait...
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
all you need is a dedicated user base that can you can grow. Microsoft is doing the right thing here, they've got the money to play a long game.
What dedicated user base? Remember the past user base for Windows Mobile was primarily business users. WP7 is not backwards compatible and WM6 was hardly loved by its users. For business users like me, I was forced to get WM6 by the company, and I hated it. With WP7 focused on the consumer market and missing many enterprise features, it is highly unlikely that our company would recommend much less purchase WP7 phones at the moment. New business users might as well get a BlackBerry as it seems to be the only purely business smart phone left. iPhone and Android are both adding enterprise features with each release so at the moment, they are more likely to be adopted by businesses than WP7.
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what's wrong with the way iOS 4 (and now WP7) does multitasking?
Nothing, really. It's just something for neckbeards to scream about.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
You better bring something that no one else has.
Yup... and especially not LESS.
WP7 doesn't do multitasking with third party apps (only Microsoft's own apps has this advantage, go figure...), and doesn't even support encrypted Exchange connections. Yes, yes, Microsoft wrote Exchange, and even Windows Mobile 6.5 supported this! This will effectively shut out many enterprise users from using this phone if their servers reject unencrypted connections (and rightly so, in my opinion).
It's funny when iPhone has support for encrypted Exchange connections in built-in software on both OS X (Mail) and iOS, and MS in neither Windows 7, nor Windows Phone 7. No, not even Windows Live Mail supports true Exchange connections -- it has to be set up to serve as an IMAP server. And Exchange is a behemoth in the enterprise market.
Go go Ballmer with your strategic decisions.
Or maybe it's their shareholders that need to go "strategic" on Ballmer...
The only thing I want to know is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not selling a phone, at least, not according to the ads. They're selling an excuse. Otherwise, how can it be "the phone for people who want to do other stuff than be using the phone."
They practically come right out and imply that it's going to be as buggy as an un-patched windows 95 machine...
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I see some MS-Bot came and marked you troll. But you're absolutely right. The commercials make no sense at all. Wouldn't a mobile device maker (and the carriers that carry it) want you to use the phone more?
Hey guys we have this great phone that you won't use like all the other phones out there!
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet that particular "feature" can be chalked up the the general craptitude of the .NET Compact Framework they've chosen to ship with. It probably uses too much memory, deadlocks, can't relinquish devices or otherwise does nasty things which assume only one running instance.
All the 1st party apps are native, so they're not affected. 3rd party apps are expected to use the runtime so they are. Assuming the APIs that apps run against define a sensible life cycle I don't see any reason they couldn't fix it.
But it does highlight how immature Windows Phone 7 is despite its glossy UI. Other red flags are things like it's inability to deal with removable storage as well as various things that were in 6.5 but not 7. Clearly these things can be (re)implemented but until they are, I would advise anyone thinking of picking up one of these phones to run a mile.
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It also doesn't let you run native code, you have to write games in XNA, so no hope for good graphics on the thing (unless you're EA or something).
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Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:4, Informative)
WM5/WM6 didn't really have significant lockdown, but as I understand it, the differences are:
WP7 - Adds a shiny UI
WP7 - Removes quite a few features/capabilities present in WM5/WM6 (see above regarding encrypted Exchange connections as an example)
WP7 - Adds iPhone-style lockdown
WP7 - Removes cut and paste (present in 5/6)
WP7 - Removes multitasking (present in 5/6)
The question is - how much of this crippling was an intentional design decision, and how much of it is Microsoft pulling a KDE 4?
C / C++ (Score:4, Insightful)
Developers! Developers! Developers! Oh, but they can only program in one language - C#. Just rewrite your codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines so you can port your apps to WP7! It'll be a lot of fun! Both iOS and Android support C / C++, and Android had to release a whole separate NDK to allow that. But yet they still released the importance of supporting one of the most prolific languages of all time.
This reminds me of Sony, where they have so many conflicting interests that they can't do anything well. Why can't Sony DVD players play DivX*? Because Sony also makes movies, and DivX is the leading choice for distributing movies over the internet.
So in this case MS has a programming language to push, a Silverlight platform to push, etc, etc. So it's C# only, to the detriment of WP7, in hopes that it will increase the popularity of C#.
*Perhaps they have models that play DivX now? I haven't looked in the last few years.
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It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
This is exactly spot on. There will be enough integration and management benefits that businesses will (eventually) begin to migrate to it for corporate needs, more and more consumers will be talked into it by Verizon reps, and eventually they'll gain a foothold. Microsoft really doesn't have any other choice but to stick with it, and to take a beating with it early if necessary. Plan B is to just be a complete non-factor - or worse, non-participant - in the mobile world.
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There is no reason for IT departments to ask for it. It supports very small subset of ActiveSync policies but doesn't support turning off certain hardware features (like the camera) or encrypting all email/contacts/calendars on the device. I personally thought they should have targeted RIM and brought a usable phone that supports full range of ActiveSync security. If they had done that, IT departments would have loved to pitch Blackberries out the windows and replaced them with WP7 devices.
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Xbox live integration is highly popular with all the Executives!
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Everything I've read about WP7 indicates that it's a step backwards in terms of flexibility and features from WM6.5.
Yes, the UI is cleaner and shinier, but iPhone and Android also have very nice UIs, in addition to having more applications available and more capabilities than WP7.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, they're comparing 1 day of W7 phones to 2 days of iPhone sales, and to 180 days of android sales.
Normalised:
W7: 40k
iPhone: 300k
Android: 8k
Of course, I'm not suggesting that the distribution will actually be even, but this is *way* closer to the numbers than comparing 1 days sales to 6 months of sales.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft was never late. They showed up 1/2 hour after the doors opened, sat in a corner, and alternately berated or ignored other party goers. Now, after alienating the whole room, they've gone home, put on a new dress, and come back thinking that no one will remember who they were. Sorry, bitch, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
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can someone tell me what WP7 does that makes it unique? What are its selling points? Because from what I've read, there are no unique aspects to it.
Let me start by saying I have used iPhones pretty extensively, iPhone 4 included and had owned a Nexus One since it launched up until I got my WP7 phone yesterday. I am extremely impressed. What is unique about it? I think it is an evolutionary step in the right direction in regards to user interaction and the general workflow of dealing with this relatively new form factor (that being touch-screen only). The tiles motif is extremely informative and looks surprisingly good considering how simple and bas
key differentiators (Score:4, Funny)
Re:key differentiators (Score:4, Funny)
I left my Windows Phone 7 in my unlocked car yesterday, with the windows rolled down, hoping someone would steal it. When I came back to my car, someone had left a second Windows Phone 7 next to it!
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Uh... developers? No seriously - if MS can get corporate IT staff developing business applications for mobile devices, that's a completely untapped market. Android would be the closest to that today, but MS could seal that deal quick if they play this right.
Considering that the WP7 is primarily geared to be a consumer phone, it is highly unlikely that corporate environments will recommend it much less purchase it until it gets more enterprise features. Until then, why would they even bother developing corporate business applications for it. Even if they did right now, MS has not devised a corporate deployment model as Apple has probably because this is a consumer smartphone.
Every .NET developer out there has the potential to be a WM7 dev.
True every .NET developer can develop for this phone, but right now they have to be f
While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree it's not as good as Microsoft probably hoped for, I'd like to point out that comparing it's sales to the iPhone (who was, for all intents and purposes, the first of its kind to go critical) and Android (the first solid competitor to the first smartphone to really go critical) isn't exactly fair.
If anything, I'd say that 40,000 for the first day in an already crowded market isn't bad. Not great, but not bad.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how you look at it 40,000 is still 40,000. That's a significant number of phones. The iPhone and Google's phones were hyped badly before launch; highly anticipated; no wonder they sold well.
More fair would be to compare it to say a new Nokia or Sony Ericsson top-line model. I bet those companies would be quite happy to sell that number in the first day of sales. A not hyped, "yet another" kind of phone, that's what this is and that's what it should be compared to.
But of course Apple's iPhone is the de-facto reference smartphone these days. No matter what you do, release a smartphone and it'll be compared to the iPhone first.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPhone and Google's phones were hyped badly before launch; highly anticipated; no wonder they sold well.
Exactly. There was no hype at all around Windows Phone 7. None. Nada. Zilch. That explains all those TV commercials, launch parties, paid shills like Paul Thurrott and Co. touting Windows 7 Phone as the second coming of Zeus.
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[P]eople are too fascinated and in love with their phone, and win7 phones are going to fix that for you.... wait, what?
Somehow I don't see that as a way to sell your product, when you tell it'll make you hate your phone.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft never really needed for it's advertising to be effective. When they operated out of a virtual monopoly they just spent advertising dollars to brag on themselves. Their idea seemed to be that the masses were going to have to buy it anyway, all they had to do was pat themselves on the back. This stuff of having to compete with aggressive competitors is all new to them.
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Those tv commercials are so awful, they make no sense. I think they're saying people are too fascinated and in love with their phone, and win7 phones are going to fix that for you.... wait, what? .
Exactly, you're gonna have Win Phone 7 so much you won't want to use your phone.
If a phone actually got you in and out of social apps and done with messages quicker, all it would do is enable the thumb-typing generation to send *MORE* messages in the same amount of time, not spend less time on their phhones. It's possible that they would spend even more time on the phone since it would be more convenient than before.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Funny)
touting Windows 7 Phone as the second coming of Zune.
There, fixed that for you.
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Only the "die hards" buy it on the first day, the real dyed-in-the-wool fanbois who'll buy anything with "Windows 7" written on it.
The real test is how many 'normal' people buy it in the next year.
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Not only that, but the article compares launch day numbers to launch weekend numbers to 6-month sales numbers. that doesn't really tell me anything.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's not fair to make the comparison just because AT&T didn't bother to supply their stores with anything. I have a friend who took the day off work to wait in line and buy one. He had called the store and asked them if he needed to get in early and they told them they had plenty of phones in stock and that he could come in any time and buy one. He got there an hour before the store opened and found out that the AT&T corporate store had 2 phones in stock. That's right. 2. Now maybe that's all the demand they thought they'd get but that store was sold out the second the store opened.
I don't think AT&T has any interest in offering serious competition to the iPhone. That's why all their android phones are pretty crappy compared to T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon.
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I don't think AT&T has any interest in offering serious competition to the iPhone. That's why all their android phones are pretty crappy compared to T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon.
pretty much. A good friend of mine is on AT&T, and just a couple of weeks ago he was asking me about which Android phone he should get. I told him "if you insist on staying with AT&T, just get an iPhone 4. If you really want an Android phone, go with a different carrier."
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Google says it's activating 200,000 [computerworld.com] androids a day and Apple sold 270,000 iphones on it's first day plus 600,000 pre-orders. At this rate, MS will NEVER CATCH UP. No, they won't. All the excuses you all are making for MS fail to make up for the basic math here and the reasons for why this happened are irrelevant. The bottom line is that the $100 million ad campaign MS just bought will
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I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I'm also not one to judge a technology on its first day or first week of sales. For one very specific reason - nobody's used it for any significant length of time yet.
It takes a while to determine if some technology is really really nice, or a complete piece of crap. If you base your judgment on a slick demo plus 5 minutes of use, you're in fact no better than the infamous PHB who decides to use some horrible technology due to a really good sales pitch. Admins generally need a g
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I think if you want to make a penetration into a crowded market, you've got not just do as well as the competition, you've got to do a lot better than the competition. Remember: cell phones and mp3 players were supposedly a "crowded market" too when Apple released theirs.
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Yes, those are all very impressive numbers (except the 14.1 million iPhone 4 numbers, which are mostly current customers with old iPhones, not new customers). However, this doesn't change the fact that you're extracting a conclusion based on one point of data. Many people have already commented that many stores only had 5-10 phones total, leaving a long waitlist of customers.
without bringing any new functionality
This is your opinion. For me, windows phone 7 integrates better with my devices, has a better user interface, better sync software, of
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I didn't say the iPhone was the first...I said it was the first to go critical.
Far too early to say (Score:5, Insightful)
At this moment, declaring Windows Phone 7 a flop is just FUD.
Re:Far too early to say (Score:4, Insightful)
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The "facts", as they were presented in the story, were based on comparing an opening day (a Monday) to a launch weekend (incidentally a time when people have more time for shopping, if you didn't know) and a launch month. It is evident that this proves nothing.
Wait, we're comparing one *day* to six months? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another fabulous slashdot article summary - comparing the sales on the first day of the WP7 phone with 6 months of sales for the G1? Seriously? I'm no Microsoft fanboy (I've got a G1 sitting on my desk 8 inches from me right now), but c'mon. It would be much more interesting to know how many G1's were sold the first day, the first week, and the first month, and compare that to WP7.
Re:Wait, we're comparing one *day* to six months? (Score:4, Informative)
Well a few things to put into perspective. 40,000 is the reported number by a third party. That number may not be correct. The actual number may be higher or lower.
The second thing is that the G1 was one model from one manufacturer. By reports, there were 9 WP7 phones from several different manufacturers. Initially there were reports that some places were "sold out". If the number is correct then there was not a large initial supply. With 9 different models, it's hard to believe the manufacturers released less than 6,000 units per model.
The discrepancy might be that MS has reserved one for every one of its employees. So that 90,000 additional and may have created an artificial scarcity not driven by consumer demand.
Me either. (Score:3, Informative)
Neither?
Actually yes... (Score:2)
I *do* know someone with a Windows Phone 7 phone.
It was bought for them by their work.
Do I know anyone who has bought one by personal choice? Not yet...
Re:Actually yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is, there are still companies that are as near as dammit 100% Microsoft shops (or at least are for anything that matters) - though they're becoming a lot thinner on the ground than they were five years ago.
There are also quite a few companies that *think* they're 100% Microsoft shops. (These are the companies where technology isn't core to their business, and the management think that if they're running Windows on their desktop PC, everything else must be Windows as well - after all, you can't get a computer from IBM to talk to one from Fujitsu now[1], can you?). Well and good if you're selling your phone to management at such companies.
But I don't think that's what Microsoft aim to do. The iPhone was probably the first smartphone with real consumer appeal, and if you walk into any UK phone store today you'll see that 80% of the phones they're really pushing are, to a greater or lesser extent, smartphones. Plain old mobile phones without all the smart functionality are being pushed almost exclusively onto Pay as you Go customers and those on a very low budget - two years from now, I reckon a non-smartphone will be as easy to find on the high street as a non-cameraphone is today. My guess is that Microsoft want a piece of that market.
[1] Note for younger /.'ers : Way back in the mists of time, interoperability between computer systems was almost unheard of. You bought the computer from Company X, who also sold you a bunch of other peripherals which connected using proprietary interfaces. Even if you could somehow hook the tape drive from one manufacturer's computer up to another, you'd likely have a hell of a job getting useful data out of it. If you had any sort of networking, it also was proprietary. Standards? What are they?
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you will about Microsoft but I don't think they actually had expectations of the things flying off the shelf in the first few days. They know they're re-entering a brutal market with a lot of very good products and very strong competitors.
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The score here... (Score:2)
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They are hard to get. On tuesday nobody could find one, most stores don't even know when they will get them in stock, even if you ordered they won't arrive until next week. Too early to conclude anything. I attended an MS conference on tuesday and they only had like 4 in total.. and there where hundereds of people there including MS employess.. can't find em, can't buy em.
Not enough units (Score:5, Informative)
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We bought my wife's at Costco, where they were only given 5 of the Samsung Focus' for launch and we stood in line to get it. Costco is definitely the place to buy one 'tho, best prices, they waive the activation fees, and throw in some extras (mostly junk, but it did include a car charger).
I'm just itching to see what the second round of hardware is going to offer, but after watching my wife play with hers for the last 3 days, I'm definitely trading in my iphone, the ads to not do the phone justice. I'm not
On the contrary, it's a great success (Score:2)
was expected (Score:2)
From what I've heard, it doesnt have true multitasking, proper copy paste, app installations from non trusted sources,etc -- similar shortcomings like the original iPhone
Its almost as if they tried to copy iPhone , but copied the original one rather than iPhone 4.
Also, why is this in the Apple category??
And
Failed launch (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe its due to the fact that theres handset shortages everywhere and partner staff were not trained correctly, their canadian launch was abysmal, i have not seen any adds on tv for it at all here in canada, theres no advertising in their launch partner stores like telus, bell and rogers, on launch day the only store that had anything in ontario was telus flagship store in toronto and they only had the htc surround which almost no one likes, i called several telus stores in london ontario where i am, and most dident know when they were getting them, they received shipment on the second day of launch but
so far were on the 4th day and the lg optimus 7 is nowhere to be found, acording to posts on the net the situation is the same at bell and rogers with staff either not knowing what windows phone 7 is or not very interested in selling it, so it sounds like ms at least in canada is not pushing its launch partners to get any displays out or doing a very good job in getting interest going, but hey just last night alone i saw 5 kinect adds in one hour, that speaks where their priorities lie.
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I reluctantly admit it looks pretty fine.. (Score:4, Informative)
The question these days of course is not what the phone can do OOTB, but what you can install on it later. AFAIK there isn't much of an 'app ecosystem' for the platform. They're also charging device manufacturers a license fee to ship with the OS, which isn't smart in a world rapidly flowing with Android phones. I wouldn't ring the death bell just yet though - it seems the market's changing pretty fast with the iPhone losing it's fashionable appeal here in the EU now that road-workers, plumbers and unemployed single fathers have the things.
Market differentiation allows for consumer individuation - something Apple's aesthetic homogeneity, doesn't offer. Think Similar (TM).
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Science, I say Science again! (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the comparison of First day :: Launch Weekend :: First 6 Months
Re:Science, I say Science again! (Score:4, Informative)
oh my, what do the other numbers break down to?
180 days, 1.5M units = 8,333.3 units per day
Who cares? I think it'd be funny if WP7 went the way of the kin, but the article and summary were poorly written.
Basically (Score:2)
Give it away (Score:2)
Microsoft would be smart to subsidize the cost of the phones (which are only on AT&T and T-Mobile) and give it away for free. Then, it might make an impact.
Steve Ballmer's last chance (Score:2, Funny)
He's on it like Donkey Kong.
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He's moved onto barrels now?
Oh, and does that mean he has a hairy back? Eh... excuse me while I vomit into my coffee.
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But is Windows Phone 7 as tasty as the Zune [gawker.com]?
Why would anyone expect anything different? (Score:2)
I still want it in PDA form. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I could get one of these in a PDA-like form instead of phone-like, for under $300, I'd get one, if for no other reason than compatibility testing, development, and the XBox Live integration.
But I am not going to replace my phone at this time.
And that's a real key point to remember, there. Unlike many consumer electronic devices, there are huge barriers to getting a new phone as soon as it comes on the market. Contracts to not all expire at the same time. Check for sales numbers on the 2-year anniversary of the release of previous popular phones (like the iPhone 3Gs for example), and check for sales numbers after a full year of peoples' contracts expiring, and then we'll talk.
Myself, I have no idea if WP7 will succeed, but I think it's got a shot, especially if they take certain actions that they haven't taken yet (eg. extend the "indy marketplace" concept from the XBox to WP7, and STOP PUSHING ZUNE BRANDING SO HARD).
That's because people remember the past versions (Score:2, Interesting)
People are not excited because past versions of their OS have had such serious issues, that why would people want to put themselves through that again?
I knew so many people that switched to Android, the Palm Pre, and the iPhone from a Windows Phone because they got tired of rebooting their phone on a daily basis.
My buying experience (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My buying experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Does everybody have amnesia? Microsoft has been making smartphones for a long time now. Calling this a version one product would be like calling Vista a version 1 product. It's significantly different from it's ancestors, but it has ancestors. I would hope they learned something along the way.
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Um, no, it is a v1 product. It comes from a company that has previously shipped products meant for the same class of task (OS for a phone), but that doesn't mean it has ancestors. The UI is totally new, built from scratch. That's what people are seeing and responding to.
You have to go clear down to the kernel to find anything much in common with WinMo, and even there it's received a huge degree of improvement. Would you call the first Android phones not a "v1" product just because Google obviously took less
Why Microsoft is in trouble... (Score:2)
Do you know anyone who reads Slashdot? (Score:2)
I don't. Clearly it's a failure.
It's not about initial sales (Score:3, Insightful)
...and it never was. It's about long term sales. MS is late to the game, when the market is already approaching optimal saturation. For them, they won't see the huge initial growth that the other platforms did.
What they are banking on, and what I am watching for, is their staying power. If MS has learned anything, it's patience. They have the war chest and experience to play the "slow and steady" game.
This assumes that they have something unique to offer. I see them as being in one of the best positions to challenge RIM ( I wish to $diety SOMEONE would. Blackberries suck ass, and the server is only fun to administrate if you are a masochist ).
Big marketing mistake... (Score:4, Interesting)
naming your phone OS after an OS that people use only because they have to (yeah, I know Win 7 is better than Vista, but what isn't).
Observe that even though Mac OS X has a better image than Windows nobody calls iPhone OS X or even iPhone iOS in marketing. Sure, Microsoft makes only the OS, but they should have come up with a different name, Google uses "Android" for example, if they used "Linux" their success would probably be different.
I'll be brave and fess up.... (Score:5, Informative)
We all have different needs and wants from our devices so to help you understand my angle; I am an occasional business traveler who enjoys being connected to email, can access maps and driving directions, restaurant and business information nearby, read various Office documents, and generally stay in touch. I am also a hobby programmer and enjoy writing little utility apps for my personal use. I am not a heavy app downloader - my iPhone had all of 20 installed apps. I am a gamer but generally enjoy puzzle and strategy games over FPS or other games that demand heavy real-time input. I do not own an XBox (PS3 for me). I do not use Facebook or Twitter in any real capacity. I tried, and I just don't get it. And finally I am a HUGE music lover. I'm the guy that still buys CDs for the artwork and rips them at higher bitrates. I'm always on the lookout for something new. I also rip all of my DVDs (movies and TV) so I can take them on travel and watch them on the plane.
If you picked up on the iPhone comment above your first question might be why I considered defecting? The simple answer is iTunes. I've had many minor glitches and nags with iTunes over the years, however the recent move of my music and movie library to a NAS was so painful it was the last straw for iTunes.
So what's to like about Win7?
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There's the XBOX, they make money of their servers and related products, and they do a lot of business with various products and services related to Exchange.
And they make a damn fine mouse.
But in the consumer world, there's Windows, Office, and XBox. Everything else they've tried to do has failed.
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No their server products make money, the database, their dev tools, heck even the xbox by now makes money. But I do not see Winmobile end of the line, it simply is a restart. Microsoft usually is very stubborn about pressing products into the market. If they followed the US business rules they would have given up Windows by version 2.0 and probably their dev tools by 1988.
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I love to see these guys fail.
It failed? I thought it was a big success? [tgdaily.com] Maybe they should have built a few more??
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They were very innovative in the 90s
Can you name a few innovative products from MS?