I missed this yesterday,
probably because Microsoft wanted me to: less than two months after launch -- and only after a very expensive, high-profile advertising campaign -- they're pulling the plug on Kin, which they'd touted
as the first "social media phone." The demise of Kin (insert "next of Kin" joke here) contains a couple of lessons, but to my mind the most important one is this: social media is not something people
are willing to pay for. It has to be free... and therefore ad-supported.
Basically Kin was done in by Verizon, which decided to charge $30 per month for unlimited data access. Let' set aside
the fact that the monthly data fee cost almost as much as the Kin One at $49.99 (the Kin Two sold for $99.99). Egregiously, Verizon was asking smartphone fees without delivering smartphone services:
the devices are indeed handy for accessing multiple social networks and all that with the Loop feature, which combined feeds from Microsoft services and sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, but
had none of the other assorted bells and whistles of smart devices (most notably, they didn't support third-party apps).
I don't know if it was Verizon's plan to kill Kin all along, or what;
there does seem to be a trend of service providers doing their best to discourage handset makers from introducing new products for some reason. Whatever the motive, the decision to charge $30 per
month for a not-so-smart phone had to be either malicious or breathtakingly greedy and stupid, considering other kinda-smart phones typically carry data fees of just $9.99 per month.
The
extortionate pricing was especially daft considering who the Kin phones seemed to be targeting. From what I can deduce, it wasn't really intended for professionals, who are likely to already own a
bona fide smartphone for work-related activities. By process of elimination, that pretty much leaves teenagers and college students as the logical intended market for the Kin devices. It's entirely
possible that young adults would want a mobile device whose primary selling point was easy management of social network profiles; but it's pretty darn unlikely they would be willing to pay $30 per
month for this service.
Yes, social networking and mobile devices are addictive, if recent studies are to be believed. But it appears social networking isn't so urgent that young adults are
willing to pay for uninterrupted mobile access just to stay abreast of the latest developments. Why shell out a dollar a day when you can just wait half an hour and check your profile from your laptop
-- or get the full suite of Web services and apps with a real smartphone for the same data fee?