“On Monday morning, the day after the U.S. launch of the Lumia 900 — the device with which Nokia and Microsoft hope to challenge Apple’s and Google Android’s growing dominance of the global smartphone market — I searched the Internet for photographs or videos of customers lining up to buy it,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“I needn’t have bothered,” P.E.D. reports. “The New York Times’ Nick Binton spent much of the big day — April 8, 2012 — calling every AT&T store within five miles of New York City to see how sales were going. Nineteen didn’t answer the phone, 18 played a tape saying they were closed for Easter Sunday, 2 AT&T resellers were open but said they didn’t have the Lumia 900 yet.”
P.E.D. asks incredulously, “Wait. Easter Sunday?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, it makes a splash alright.
an iphone wannabe?? No, the lumia 900 looks nothing like the iphone. Or maybe you just need a new pair of eyes. :/
Maybe if it were brown . . . oh, what . . . dunked in chocolate?
Who thought up that?
Ker-plunk! Right to the bottom, in Davey Jones’ locker!
Maybe there marketing angle was trying to leverage the second coming or something…
Resurrection greens, (or blues): Just like cooking 4 day old cabbage – ‘They rise again’.
“Wait. Easter Sunday?”
They picked exactly that day on propose in order to blame it for the no lines or slow sales.
Bingo! Nailed it.
@ imppaul: ooh! Was that pun intentional?
MDN Take= Epic.
I like their plan. I like it a lot.
The AT&T stores should’ve gave them away as part of an Easter egg hunt to lure customers into the stores:-)
Or at least get some employees to work on Easter.
Great idea Nokia & MS. They should schedule new launches exactly the same way as this one.
This part from the original article is also rather hilarious, as it shows just how badly Nokia have allowed themselves to be used by Microsoft’s idea of “marketing”:
Besides, Nokia had already proven they could draw a crowd. For the phone’s official launch party two days earlier, Times Square was busting — as numerous YouTube videos will attest — with excited fans.
Only trouble is, they were all there to see the performance of a hot young hip hop artist — Nicki Minaj — not to buy a Lumia 900.
So, Nokia and Microsoft are using the exact same pathetic tricks that Microsoft uses for its store openings?? What does that say about their faith in the product on its own merits?
It says that Nokia and Microsoft believe that propaganda works. And it does… on people without any skills for critical thinking or independent thought, a group that includes many, many Americans. You know who you are.
MDN’s Take – Beautiful!
The Lumia’s launch strategy reminds me of a review I read for the movie, “Hope Floats”.
Reviewer: “Hope isn’t the only thing that floats.”
More like a dull thud.
I experience a similar kind of splash the morning after 2 for 1 burrito night.
It’s not an iPhone wannabe… It’s an iPod nano wannabe.
and it made a tinkle. not a splash.
I have never thought of myself as a marketing expert. Maybe I could get a job at one of these companies. A total amateur like myself is probably better than all the very smart MBA’s these companies hire.
All frosting and no cake.
Not a word on this “event” ever made it to the Monday morning news. Not even ABC’s “Good Morning America” mentioned it, and it is located on Times Square itself.
But, one item in the article stumped me. “…launch a make-or-break product on the third-biggest holiday in the Christian calendar.”
1. Christmas. 2. ???? 3. Easter.
What’s number two?
(Athiest – I choose not to believe in anything mythical.)
This only reinforces how MS is becoming increasingly clueless on how to engage people and market products. They have the much larger hurdle of the Microsoft name being synonymous with having bloated, buggy, unintuitive user interfaces and being virus-prone, regardless if it is true or not with their phones. Perception is 99% of the battle.
But, one item in the article stumped me. “…launch a make-or-break product on the third-biggest holiday in the Christian calendar.”
1. Christmas. 2. ???? 3. Easter.
What’s number two?
I’m a Christian, and I, too, was puzzled by the “third-biggest” designation. Christmas and Easter are definitely the two biggest ones (personally, I’d say the order should be 1. Easter, 2. Christmas), so I’m at a loss for what the third one would be, or what other Christian holiday could possibly be above those two.
(Athiest – I choose not to believe in anything mythical.)
Myself, I choose not to believe that the complex encoding of our DNA could possibly be the result of random chance, among other things. (Especially as I’m a computer programmer – if my programs could be coded by random chance and reshuffling of program code, my job would be a TON easier!)
Not random. Constrained by physics, chemistry, natural selection… You really should read some scientific literature sometime.
If there’s a paper explaining how physics, chemistry and natural selection can create coded information (not just patterns) without a guiding intelligence, please provide a link and I’ll be glad to take a look.
Back to the original question… perhaps Mr. Elmer-Dewitt was including Thanksgiving as a holiday on the “Christian calendar”? That’s about the only possibility I can think of that would make sense of his ranking method: 1. Christmas, 2. Thanksgiving, 3. Easter. All of which are traditionally holidays involving some kind of family togetherness, and all of which would make very odd launch dates for a make-or-break product like this.
It’s a process that took a billion years to go from raw elements to the bare beginnings of single-cell life. Then another billion years to get where we are today. That’s a lot of time for many cycles of natural trial and error. Can you even comprehend how many generations there are in 10,000 years, let along a billion? We humans are but a fly speck on the windshield of time.
Where did the raw elements come from?
@ Ditchdoc68: Alright, I know where you’re headed here. I don’t believe for one second that some gray-haired old man in the sky decided one day to utter some arcane spell while performing a complex gesture with his hand, and *presto!* there were elements and stuff.
So the big Bank occurred some 13 billion years ago. Hydrogen, helium and boron were formed. Gas condensed into stars, and eventually under gravitational forces, stars began fusing hydrogen into more helium, and later as temperatures and pressures grew, elements up to iron were created by fusion as stars exploded. New stars formed. Some stars got really huge and exploded in supernovae, which created pressures and temperatures high enough to fuse lighter elements into heavier elements, all the way up to #92, uranium. As the years passed, more and more stars were born and the heavier elements were distributed throughout the then-small universe, eventually aggregating into disks around stars. More time passed and these disks condensed into planets, one of which became our Earth.
This is a very rough outline and you could do a Google search on “how did the elements form” and check the various pages for further information
Fat Tuesday?
Agree on the #1 & #2, but the order depends on which Christians you ask.
In the Western Church, Christmas #1, Easter #2.
In the Eastern Church, Easter#1, Christmas #2.
Here’s the thing that worries me…
The real “point-of-sale” for a lot of people is the cell phone stores. And MS has made it clear they are going to start paying bounties to the folks who work in those stores for every windows phone they sell.
The whole crowd who got taken by “this Android phone is just like an iPhone” is just as susceptible to “this Windows Phone is better than an iPhone.”
If MS can control enough of the Point of Sale people, they really do have a chance of getting their inferior phone in the hands of millions.
Thoughts? And why does MS always seem to have to resort to something that smacks of “cheating”? They can’t make a better phone, so they’ll pay people to push it on the unsuspecting public. Bleah.
Dmitri, if you are true (and I suspect you are) then Microsoft is very clueless. Best Buy is going out of business because people are buying online (usually after visiting Best Buy to see what they will be getting). Microsoft needs a kick-butt (non-Flash) innovative website. Perhaps a full Lumia 900 simulator with working apps…if Microsoft can manage to put out a usable application in less than 5 years.
Mmmm Chevy made a smart phone !!! (-:
You are so right a splash alright, the sound a lead weight or a brick makes as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.