T-Mobile has confirmed that they will stop selling the Sidekick line of phones.
The move comes a day after Microsoft announced that KIN will be phased out, in order to focus on Windows Phone 7. These two moves, combined with the phaseout of Windows Mobile Standard, leave Microsoft without a single feature phone offering.
The T-Mobile Sidekick was doomed from the start of Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger. Mobile Vice President Roz Ho intended to leverage Danger’s talent to convert the Windows CE platform into a social media-sharing successor to Sidekick. In an ironic twist, Roz Ho gave orders to cut costs in outsourcing Sidekick data management, which led to the Sidekick’s massive data outage, leaving user Sidekick data missing and temporarily lost.
The death of the Sidekick platform did not help KIN, which media reports peg at having sold less than 500 units across all Verizon retail channels. Microsoft refuses to comment as to if that sales figure is correct.
Sidekick operated under a BSD-based operating system, making future development virtually unacceptable at Microsoft. The open source platform would have required Microsoft to continue offering source code for additional features and services.
As previously reported, Microsoft will roll KIN’s advances, built on Sidekick braintrust, over to Windows Phone 7. It is expected that KIN services, including it’s cloud storage and sharing options, will be available in a future update to Windows Phone 7, after launch.
What a waste of money. What is going on at MS?
“Sidekick operated under a BSD-based operating system, making future development virtually unacceptable at Microsoft. The open source platform would have required Microsoft to continue offering source code for additional features and services.”
WOW! I wouldn’t have expected that mess-up from Chris.
The biggest reason why companies like BSD-licensed software instead of GPL-licensed software: The BSD license does *NOT* require you to release your source code!
While the kernel was BSD licensed, GPL elements were used atop the BSD kernel. Kernel changes themselves were immaterial, I mean, nobody was going to really benefit from any performance tweaks to BSD itself.
The “open source platform” from all outward appearances would have required a combination of both NetBSD and GPL code atop it to create a functional platform to build on Sidekick (a la Android). Thus, the article is correct.
Android too could have been run under NetBSD… but… you get the idea. It wouldn’t have mattered much to protect the kernel if you still need to go the GPL route for most of the stuff on top of it.
However, there was also a lot of stigma in inner circles inside Microsoft to use BSD, a non-Windows kernel. Reportedly, J Allard wanted to maintain the kernel and reboot the platform, while the Mobile Devices team demanded it be revived under Windows CE.