It is easy to sit on the sidelines, point and laugh at how the overall Windows Phone 7 tire fire is burning daily. It is also greatly disappointing to see as whilst I had predicted from the start that Windows Phone 7 will fail with consumers but could win with business/enterprise it’s also bitter sweet victory in many ways to be right.
How did the product arrive at this state? Where a pittance of allegedly 1.6million units have been sold out of the 2million units known to be “in-market”. My thinking is as follows:
No Aesthetic Differentiation.
Stating that is bold and a bit of an eyebrow raiser, as clearly the Metro UI is different to the rest right? Not really, as you are probably looking at this through the lens of a TechEd T-Shirt wearing c# ninja aka Microsoft “aware” perspective. The reality is if you go into a mobile store of any kind around the world, you just have to stare at the buffet of phones on display and cannot really help but notice one thing. They all seem to look kind of like the iPhone in terms of shape – keep in mind we humans are pattern people, we seek patterns first and then adjust to what the pattern is second.
If all the phones have similar shapes then what does that say? Does it feel like an iPhone knockoff? It has the similar price tag. So why pay for a copy of a popular device when you can have the real thing?
Assuming you get past that train of thought let us look at it from a different perspective. You are in the store, you get excited over the initial 10seconds of “Wow, nice UI” moment(s). The more you use it, the more you start thinking “meh, what kind of apps does this thing have?” so now you have to grasp the concept of the Zune Marketplace – assuming you’re outside of the US and the brand Zune is “What the freaking hell is a Zune?” moment(s). How do you grasp Zune Marketplace while in a store? You click on Marketplace but nothing happens as most phones have no internet connection(s) in stores.
I have seen many a “marketplace” on the ye olde phones that were run by carriers so what makes this different to those as again who is Zune? What apps do you have and do you have Angry Birds? Skype? Foursquare? Facebook (yes its built in, but are others outside the Microsoft sphere of influence aware of this?) etc?
Too consistent & poor quality bands.
The differentiation is one thing but then comes the moment of too much consistency. All of the applications tend to blur into being the same old cookie cut style. There is not a real sense of change or theming in place other than games. Today’s twitter application looks like a thousand other twitter applications aside from some color changes. There is no real sense of depth and whilst the team has pushed for “authentically digital” which is a noble gesture in the art scene, it is but one lacking in the consumer space.
To put it another way, If I have a voice recording “memo” style application then please make it look like a recording application (i.e. iPhone uses this big Microsoft and it takes on this “theme” of being the app). There are some diamonds in the rough when it comes to the marketplace, not all are bad – most are though.
All it takes is any C# developer with some developer muscle and a lame brain idea around FlashLight, Twitter, Task list or Tip Calculator and pretty much soon you have a saturated idea brimming to the surface of applications made available to you for purchasing. The quality baseline for success in the market is measured around quantity not quality. iPhone is no different much like Android, the difference with those phones however is they aren’t the ones struggling to convince people that their old version isn’t the same as you see before you in the new version(s). They don’t have as big of a hill to climb back out of and arguing mediocrity in quality bands as an excuse as to why is plain stupid.
There is no switch up inside the phone, all apps tend to become the same look and feel repeatedly – so my point is this is not just a phone it’s a media device that should be filled with brainless eye candy as much as functional brilliance. Let the audience decide if Authentically Digital compositions are their cup of tea but forcing all to bow down to this mentality is simply locking you into a bubble of ignorance.
Dance with the girl you came with.
Consumers are morons, and are easily tricked if you have a brilliant strategy. Urban legend of Colgate guy wanting to increase toothpaste sales that tried everything but in the end all he did was increase the diameter of the hole in which toothpaste pours out of by 3mm in the end sent sales through the roof (given we used more toothpaste unwittingly). It is a story I was told in my days of Marketing 101 training, but it stuck with me for obvious reason(s) – hopefully.
Microsoft is so preoccupied with “beating” the other guy (and we used to drink that compete rage elixir often) that its lost perspective on the places its getting success – Business/Enterprise. Go into a govt department, large mining company, finance sector the whole thing and ask them how they are coping with business related devices such as PDA’s and wanting field staff to do xyz. You would be surprised at the response you get – especially how iPhones, Androids and Windows Phone 7 are not even in the race. The reason being is simple – “How does one deploy a private app to my citizens?”
The reality is Microsoft’s spent the lion share of its marketing spend on US Consumers hoping that this like some kind of weird end of year Xbox style achievements metrics “Congratulations! You have Achieved Level 1 in sales!” moment(s).
Inside Australia for example the WP7 Marketing is a secret? As its rare you catch glimpses of its existence outside a mobile store and even then you have Windows Phone7 Logo right beside Windows Phone 6 devices. Confused? I was.
The win here while it may not be loud (which sadly gets you career points in Microsoft) is that if Microsoft released an Enterprise follow-on with the WP7 devices focused on allowing draconian SOE overlords to brick the phones in such a way that forces its peon’s to adhere to the blah blah policy then you in turn would have a backdoor into consumer market.
The reason being is these are human beings the phones are being handed to during work hours. The more they use them, the more the grow accustom and forgiving towards the device you are giving your crack away via corporate mandates. Establishing a habitual usage amongst the business/enterprise community in turn creates natural evangelism, which in turn can either make or break you (if its crap phones it will be very loud as to why).
If you are in a meeting and you see many WP7 phones in the room, you cannot but help notice them – that is what they call “product placement” in marketing terms and you get it free amongst the business community.
Nobody is doing this right now, and I’ve witnessed thousands upon thousands of units of HP IPAQ like devices running Windows Mobile 6.5 as a result (right now I’m staring at a body of work I’ll need to work on soon in this space, simply because no Wp7 device is available for commercial usage).
Competitions are an act of marketing desperation.
I was once told inside Microsoft that if you get to a point where you are running a competition to excite developers around a product, you have failed. It is the last desperate refuge for a marketing to try to regain some lost momentum around marketing a product that really needed more than a “Win a new phone?” moment(s).
When I was doing my interviews for Product Manager on the Silverlight team, my bosses boss (Dave Mendlen) asked me how I would handle a competition etc for a product if had $50k to spend? I guess he wanted to see me break it down into its overall pieces etc. My response was simple
“I’d take the $50k, put up a 1x Page website and simply give away a CAR in any country around the world for the best and fairest blah blah”.
My point was simple; competitions suck firstly so I would rather get this fool’s errand out of the way upfront. Secondly, if you are going to have competitions then go big or go home. Don’t pussyfoot around with $1k or below offerings, you want competition right? You want people to take notice and work hard to fight to the finish then put a carrot that is big enough that it feels both reachable and enriching at once.
I see way to many competitions for developers to write xyz Windows Phone App around lately and it’s just sad to watch. Microsoft needs to raise its game and seed the product in much smarter ways then weak competition tactics. Evangelism needs to be smarter and the marketing spend / product placement campaigns need to be better than it is today. Seeing a Windows Phone 7 on a TV show is a good start but it lacks follow-up(s).
If I go to a geek conference of any kind I want to see Wp7 branding everywhere but I also want to see someone doing something interesting with the phone(s). I want sizzle and holding creations as if the one Brandon Foy hostage to “If you get 200k+ views I’ll let you do a commercial for real” is like asking Don Draper to audition for entry-level copywriter. You had talent in front of you and you still missed it.
In Summary
The phone is failing and it is not really the actual phones fault it’s more direction, understanding of who needs the phone and lastly ensuring the quality bands associated with the phone raise. If you are going to go head to head with Apple who have shown repeatedly that Industrial Design / User Experience is what consumers are really attracted to. Bring it fully do not “version three we will get it right / marathon speech” it to death.
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