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Windows Phones Getting Buried At Carriers' Stores

Posted by Soulskill on from the stop-shipping-them-with-complementary-shovels dept.

tripleevenfall sends in a PCMag story about how Microsoft's problems in driving Windows Phone 7 adoption stem in part from how the phones are represented to customers in carriers' stores. Quoting: "At AT&T, the salesperson was a recent iPhone to Android convert. She was enthusiastic about WP7 devices, saying that Netflix was on WP7 and not available on her Android, and looked embarrassed when she walked me over to AT&T's unkempt WP7 display shelf. ... At a Verizon reseller kiosk, a salesman clearly tried to deter me from buying a WP7 device altogether. Not only did not he appear to know the fundamental difference between Windows Mobile and WP7, his kiosk didn't even offer WP7 devices and said you'd only find WP7 demo products at a few of Verizon's big retail stores. 'Honestly, only 1 out of 500 customers comes in here asking for a Windows phone,' he said. 'Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks until it performs better on the market.'"

7 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . by kimvette · · Score: 3, Interesting

    'Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks until it performs better on the market. . .'

    . . . and it won't perform better on the market until agents have it in their hands to offer customers. Catch-22 anyone?

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    1. Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Its funny to see MS getting the short end of the monopoly stick. Just deserts.

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      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    2. Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . by LWATCDR · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not really. Microsoft has advertised them all over the place. I have seen them at AT&T and Verizon stores. kiosks almost never even have phones they have those stupid cheap fake phones with pictures for screens.
      Windows Phone 7 is feature incomplete. Mango when it get here will bring WP7 up the the same standard as teh current iPhone and Android handsets but that is still not till fall.
      Also Windows Phones is the past where enterprise devices while WP7 is less enterprise ready than Android and iPhone. They have no buzz and no real interest.
      If Mango was out today they would be pretty interesting devices. They have some really good games and Zune Pass sounds like a killer deal. Oh and microsoft doesn't push ZunePass as a feature. The Xbox integration is at best okay IMHO but some people will love the little rewards.
      So there you have it.
      WP7 is flopping because the old market for Microsoft phones was the enterprise users and WP7 abandoned them.
      The the target market remembers Microsoft as a business phone.
      The tech writers and phone fans are all saying "It is cool but is missing a ton of features." So they are all excited about Mango and Nokia but that is in the future so the local tech experts are all saying get an Android or an iPhone today and look at WP7 when it comes out.
      And the WP7 phones are no carriers hero device. AT&T made the iPhone their hero device for a long time. Verizon pushed the Droid line to compete with the iPhone and now they have an iPhone. TMobile was the launch carrier for Android and is still an Android fan. Sprint first tried to make the Palm Pre their iPhone killer and when that didn't work out because of the bad, half baked sdk and being feature incomplete "like WP7 is now" they went to Android and made the Evo 4g their hero device.
      So no carrier is going to risk their hero device budget on a WP7 device today.

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  2. Sounds like WebOS by Scutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sprint did the exact same thing with WebOS. Granted, the hardware was nothing to write home about, but the operating system is great! The WebOS phones were always stuck in the back corner of the store, though.

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    "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
  3. WP7 vs Vista by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I actually think WP7 will fail much worse than Vista. Vista was a bit sluggish but it run the old applications. WP7 can't, and that will be fatal. All the Windows Mobile users will move to Android where their apps already work. People who already have an Android or iOS device are very unlikely to switch to WP7. All the ISVs will end up on Android and/or iOS because it's easier to port an app to a platform where you can use C/C++ and native code than one where the whole thing needs to be in C# and Silverlight or XNA. Even Angry Birds needs a C physics library. In fact even if Microsoft allow C and native code I doubt the ISVs that used to support Windows Mobile will come back because the platforms already bad market share is dropping quickly.

    E.g. Pleco - a Chinese dictionary - moved to iOS and (soon) to Android. They've dropped Windows Mobile and won't ever support WP7. When they dropped Windows Mobile the iOS version was outselling WinMo 10:1. They have core code in C/C++ which they can run on both iOS and Android (also on WinMo). No chance of it working on WP7 without rewriting in C#. And no chance of getting their handwriting and OCR libraries from third parties ported either.

    Opera have dropped Windows Mobile and won't support WP7. Once again they have C/C++ code with a few third party libraries in native ARM. It would be almost impossible to port to WP7 and even if they did Microsoft have apparently said they won't allow alternative browsers in their app store.

    In a sense WP7 is more like a console than a phone. Worse actually since XBoxes support native code as far as I know. Maybe they'll pick up games from the XBox ecosystem but I don't think that will make up for not having things like Opera and Pleco though. They've apparently offered Adobe the possibility of native code to get Flash ported and possibly will do the same for titles like Angry Birds. Still that's not really enough - Adobe haven't announced a ship date and Roxio, the Angry Birds publisher, have publicly contradicted Microsoft when Microsoft implied they had committed to porting. I.e. handing out native code passes for key applications is not enough to get people to support a platform which is obviously doomed.

    Picture Vista with no back compatibility following on from XP which had 1/3 the market share of OSX. Imagine that all the software already worked on iOS. That's the situation WP7 is in - it's actually easier to run the apps you used on Windows Mobile on Android than on WP7. Even the IHVs like HTC prefer Android because it's free to them and there are no limits on things like the Sense UI. WP7 has ridiculous limits on how much value they can add and they need to rewrite all their WinMo software in C# to make it work.

    I think the market share will drop rapidly and Microsoft will kill it. Just like Kin and Zune, both of which used the same software.

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  4. Nokia by mehrotra.akash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    With WP7 crashing, and Nokia committing to WP7 in a big way, I wonder if WP7 would take Nokia down with it...

  5. Anecdotal evidence does not a valid argument make. by TheRedDuke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    She visited four stores - one from each of the big providers. Had she come to my local AT&T store, she would have seen the giant Windows Mobile display with several working demos, not to mention a sales guy who wouldn't shut up about Xbox Live or Netflix. I'm not saying that WM7 isn't being as hotly promoted as the other platforms, but it would be nice if she were drawing this kind of conclusion from a slightly larger sample set.