Hello ccmarketers,
Has there ever been a good time to create a network of social media tools to communicate with young people? Indeed, now more than ever! We could just be a couple short years away from all Century students carrying social networking enabled (I might say “specialized”) smartphones. I think this article is particularly relevant to our current undertaking, but this also offers a good opportunity for us to test the ways we can republish (legally) entire articles for Century marketing students to review.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Microsoft unveiled two new smartphones Monday, designed for the new generation of heavy social networking users.
Called the KIN ONE and the KIN TWO, the phones feature many of the standard offerings of smartphones currently on the market: touch screens, slide-out keyboards, Web browsers with pinch-to-zoom, and applications for download. Where the phones differ from traditional smartphones is in the integration with social networks.
Instead of a slew of application-launching buttons, the phones’ home screen houses the combined feeds from the user’s social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The new phones also have a green “spot” on the main screen where users can drag photos, Web links and social network messages into and then share with friends.
The KIN phones are designed to fill a niche among teens and young adults who use their phones to text, tweet and post things to Facebook at least as much as they make phone calls.
“We saw an opportunity to design a mobile experience just for this social generation — a phone that makes it easy to share your life moment to moment,” said Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s president of the Entertainment and Devices Division, in a statement.
Both phones have essentially the same capabilities. The KIN ONE is smaller and square, while the larger KIN TWO is rectangular, with a higher-resolution camera and video-taking capabilities. The phones will be available exclusively on the Verizon network in May, though Verizon said it would not yet offer an exact release date or price plan.
This is not Microsoft’s first foray into smartphones, but it is the first time that the company had a hand in designing the complete ins and outs of a device — both the hardware and the software. Microsoft partnered with Sharp to design the KIN phones.
Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) has struggled lately in the smartphone space. Its Windows Mobile phones have lost their appeal in a market increasingly dominated by Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIMM). While Microsoft’s smartphone operating system gives it a 15% market share, and places it in third place behind RIM and Apple, it is rapidly losing ground, according to data tracker comScore.
In an effort to change its momentum, the software giant is set to unveil a complete redesign of its smartphone OS, dubbed “Windows Phone 7,” by the end of the year. Preliminary reviews of the new OS are mixed, but analysts agree that Windows Phone 7 offers a user interface that is unlike anything else on the market.
Microsoft’s strategy shiftThe smartphones that Microsoft unveiled Monday don’t run Windows Phone 7 or the existing Windows Mobile OS: In fact, they are part of a separate strategy aimed at jumpstarting Microsoft’s position in the smartphone space by targeting social networking.
“As we were working on Windows Phone 7, we decided to specifically go after this target audience,” said Beach at a Microsoft event in San Francisco. “It was customized for the social networking audience. Windows Phone 7 is about simplifying people’s lives. This phone is about amplifying people’s social lives.”
That separate strategy has some analysts scratching their heads.
0:00 /1:29Ballmer on Windows 7 for mobile“People are confused about this … because the markets are already crowded,” said Laura DiDio principal analyst at ITIC. “The problem of entering niche markets is that the phones are certainly doomed to have a very, very underdog status and a long, hard uphill climb.”
Microsoft has had limited success in the past when it has come late to a market. Despite many positive reviews of its fully redesigned Zune HD player last year, the device failed to gain traction in a market that is overly saturated and dominated by Apple’s iPod.
Its search engine Bing has also gotten rave reviews and managed to gain some ground. But most of the additional traffic has not come from the dominant Google but from Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), which Microsoft entered into a search partnership with last year.
Microsoft is hoping that its latest phone foray is more like Xbox, which found success despite coming late to the party. When Xbox went to market in 2001, the video game space was dominated by Sony (SNE), Sega and Nintendo, but Microsoft quickly became a major player.
With such limited success entering crowded markets, why take this kind of a stab at smartphones? DiDio said the rise of Apple and Google has Microsoft struggling with its image — both internally and externally. The company is trying to appear edgy, or at very least relevant.
“Now the buzz is around consumer devices and smartphones,” said DiDio. “The perception is that if you’re not there, you’re not still relevant as a 21st century business.”
“I’m not sure I would be investing my time, research and development money in this, but if they don’t, Wall Street and pundits will be all over them for not trying to play,” DiDio added. (via CNN Money)
Unfortunately we can not embed videos from news sites like CNN since they use their own flash players and not YouTube, Daily Motion, Google Video, or TED. However, we can direct students to the videos by creating posts like this. Now that the base integration is set up, this article will post both to our Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Note that I used what is called a “MORE” tag to shorten this post so it didn’t take up too much vertical space on our main blog page. The MORE tag is an easy to use button that allows to you to restrict the amount the length of a post on the main blog page. The button for inserting a MORE tag is conveniently located on the tool bar above the post text box, and when we meet in the near future to explore the ins and outs of WordPress we’ll be certain to focus on this editing feature. I have also utilized the BLOCKQUOTE tag to add a quotation box around the article, letting others know that this isn’t our content. As always, we must be certain to add citations where prudent.
4 Responses
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Judy Evenson Says:
Wonderful options! More than I need but it’s the way I end up buying a car also – it has all the bells and whistles that anyone would wish and each driver (guest at our site) uses what works for him/her.
this is really coming along! What a project… what a group!
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Stephen Says:
Judy, how did you find out about this post? Twitter, Facebook, Email, or other?
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lsmaagaard Says:
Terrific job. It was really easy – it was right there in my email! Great choice for the article. Think of the discussion possiblities!
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stephenmkelly Says:
Just an update on the KIN -
