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Windows Phones Getting Buried At Carriers' Stores
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.'"
Its funny to see MS getting the short end of the monopoly stick. Just deserts.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Thanks for letting us know?
I'm sure they were just trying to make us aware that it's going to be hard for Win Phone 7 to trounce the iPhone by 2015 if the carriers keep hiding it under the rotting corpse.
IT'S A CONSPIRACY!
These are the best devices in the entire Youniverse. They have the look and functionality of Tandy Deskmate, paired with the savvy charisma that you've come to associate with Ballmer!
If Verizon didn't keep these things DOWN, you would be able to keep them UP!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
the problem is that windows mobile phones sucked THAT bad. Like Vogon poetry bad.
'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?
...unless Microsoft is desperate enough to pay Verizon to promote WP7. For Verizon it's not a Catch-22. It's a catch-several-million-dollars-by-doing-nothing.
FTFA >> "Not only did not he appear to know the fundamental difference between Windows Mobile and WP7..."
He's hardly alone. One problem with MS changing their mobile strategy every five minutes is people have stopped giving a shit.
It's Apple vs. Android for the market share. MS is too late to join the party.
I see Apple iPhone ads almost ever other commercial break. Direct ones from apple, and carrier branded ones.. They are on constantly... I see giant Android signs up in malls.
Where is the MS Windows Phone Marketing?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The product that Verizon is selling is a monthly data plan contract. It doesn't matter what the phone attached to it is.
How can you say that? It's so cruel to poor little MS - getting shoved around by the big boys! :-( I want to join a "help MS defeat the system" society - do you know if there is one yet?
This is all just my personal opinion.
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.
Which for 95% of all customers would be an iPhone. Don't mistake me for an Apple fanboi, we have 4 Apple products in our household of which only two were purchased within the last year and none of those are mine: an iMac 27" and a spanking brand new white iPhone. Both belong to my wife. (The other two products are a 1st gen iPod Shuffle, which is mine and a 2nd gen iPod Mini which belongs to my wife.... Neither of those get much use anymore).
I'm a nerd, I admit that and proud of it. My wife, however is at the other side of the spectrum. You pretty much can't get less tech inclined as her and for people her generation (born in the eighties) that is still very common. As a matter of fact, she used to have a Windows computer and it was always "jts, can you do this for me, jts can you do that for me, ad infinitum". It's not that I don't love my wife, but if you've been married for a while that really gets on your nerves. So we bought an iMac. Now there is the occasional question, but much less trouble. I set her up an iTunes account so she could buy music. She never did.
What does this all have to do with the iPhone? Simple. A few month ago her trusty old Samsung cellphone died. Being the cheapskate I am, I bought her a new touchscreen HTC. Not the highest end, because if I'd go high end I could just as well buy an iPhone, right? She agreed with me: don't spend too much money on a stupid phone. The thing is: She was completely unable to use the phone. Calls went off without her wanting it, writing SMSes was hard (We use at least 3 languages on a daily base, so the typical T9 needs to be disabled and the on-screen keyboard needs to work well, including accentuation and stuff like that) I didn't believe her, I thought it would just be a matter of her getting used to it. Not so... After a good month and a half she was still struggling.
Again, as married guys know, having a wife complaining about the same thing over and over gets fast quick. Just to get rid of the complaints, I decided to get her an iPhone... I set it up to use our wireless, connected it to her iTunes account and registered it with her iMac and imported her iTunes music (which I ripped from CD years ago when she was still using Windows).
I got basically no questions, she managed to type SMSes (in all languages) and to do her calls and it didn't call accidentally when she didn't want it to. Within a day she started to send emails with pictures to her friends (she'd never done that on a computer AFAIK) Within two days, she had found how to download apps (mostly books apps and to my utter stupefaction she had bought a few music albums. The third day, we sit in a pub with a friend of her. She asks me to take a picture of them. I do, give her back the phone and she sends is immediately to the email of said friend. Not even thinking twice that she was now using 3G instead of the Wifi at home.
That is what the iPhone does... It enables the non-tech user to use technology. It's utterly amazing. Actually, I expected this to happen when she switched computers to the iMac, but that was not where the big "enabling" happened. The iPhone did, and if you ask me... Instead of having bought that huge-ass iMac, I should have bought her an iPad. Would have been much cheaper.
I do realize that I am comparing a cheaper phone with an iPhone and that I'm sure that the touch screen is the major reason of her inability to use the HTC. I've taken the HTC into use now. It' ok... I got "used to it", but is that really what we want? The user to "get used to it"? If the iPhone weren't so friggin expensive, I'd consider one for myself but one 50€ plan per month in this family is enough.
If the task of the salesperson is to meet the users needs, then I'd bet money on it that the iPhone fits the needs of normal (non-geek) people best.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)