Nexus One a Failed Experiment In Online Sales

shmG writes "The demise of the Google Nexus One phone is fairly straightforward: a lack of sales killed the product. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google indicates that selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead. 'The bottom line is people like to look at phones in the store. Google has a lot to learn about phone sales, this is one lesson they learned.'"

Comments

False

[mark72005]

The reason why the Nexus One failed is because it was so damned expensive out of pocket.

Re:False

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Plus, people shopping for an upgrade phone wouldn't see it on their phone company's website.

Failures:
1. Large upfront cost. Consumers don't think about future costs.
2. Not shoved in your face. Consumers aren't smart enough to seek things out.
3. Too many hoops. People had to do too much work if they wanted to get carrier subsidizing worked out.

Re:False

[mungtor]

The reason it seemed expensive is because you weren't paying off a loan with the remainder of your wireless contract. Considering that all smartphones are really just small computers, their prices are pretty much where they should be.

The reasons behind the demise were probably a) some people can't do the math to figure out how much they're really paying for the phone, and b) others really like upgrading every 2 years to impress their friends.

Re:False

[Lord Byron II]

The real problem was that nobody knew that it was available. It got plenty of attention on /. and other tech sites, but take an average Joe who owns a smart phone and I guarantee you that he's never heard of it.

Re:False

[arkane1234]

I'm slumming on T-Mobile, and if this is slumming then call me homeless.
Hella better than Verizon with customer service, features, and choices.
The price is the reason I switched, and the rest sold me.

Competition

[orcateers]

Anyone else think that the Nexus One was a project designed to push Android adoption, and that Google's support for the hardware fell off because the rest of the Android hardware market bulked up sooner than they expected? it's an idea i've considered.

Re:Competition

[fishthegeek]

IMHO it was because the hardware that was available from the carriers was really anemic. I had a G1 and it was really slow, had little memory and frankly was ugly. The MyTouch wasn't much better. I bought the Nexus 1 about 3 weeks after release and I love the phone. I suspect that Google wasn't trying to push Android adoption as much as it was trying to push OEMS to elevate the quality of the hardware. Since the N1's release we have the Evo, Droid X, and the Vibrant to hold up as high quality phones.

Lack of promotion?

[MrEricSir]

I never saw the Nexus One promoted, nor a link to the store anywhere (except perhaps on Slashdot.) Google has used their pageviews to promote other products and services, for example their ads for Chrome.

Could it be the reason Nexus One didn't succeed was simply a lack of promotion?

Online isn't the problem, it's carrier subsidies

[Andy Dodd]

95%+ of the population doesn't have a problem with being locked into a contract for two years in order to save a few hundred on a phone, especially since no provider gives any significant plan discounts to those who "bring their own device" in the USA.

So a non-subsidized phone is dead in the water from the beginning unless it offers something that's so unique as to be worth the price. (For me, if the N1 had a physical keyboard, I would have paid the money for it. Once they released the version that supported AT&T 3G, it was the only device that had a recent Android release on AT&T. However, it had no keyboard.)

Was it really a failure?

[jpmorgan]

I guess that depends on what Google hoped to accomplish. From a pure sales perspective, the Nexus One didn't make a big dent in the market. But with Android, Google is trying something that Microsoft tried with WinMo, and failed at; one of the many reasons was stagnant, crappy and divergent hardware. I've never believed the purpose of the N1 was to sell a lot of phones... that was obvious from the selection of T-Mobile as the carrier... the purpose was to drive Android forward and keep it from falling into one of the traps WinMo fell into.

So if you compare pre--N1 Android phones to phones in the post-N1 era, the difference is startling. Nexus One may have failed in sales, but it succeeded in pushing the ecosystem forward. And I suspect that's all Google ever really wanted.

n900 and carrier discount

[Bruce Perens]

I paid $500 for a Nokia n900 and get about $20 off my monthly t-mobile payment vs. what I would have paid with a subsidized phone. It evens out in the length of the two-year contract for a subsidized phone. And meanwhile I can plug in foreign SIMs when I go overseas, so I don't have to carry a separate unlocked phone. And could I really have resisted a phone that can run a full Debian distribution in a chroot while it also runs its own, mostly Open Source, non-Java, platform?

But I'm not the normal consumer, am I?