The Kin is gone. Add it to a long list of less-than-stellar product launches from Microsoft.

The tech giant s two-month-old phone was discontinued this week, and the team responsible for developing it has been dispatched to work on Windows Phone 7, the company says. While the Kin was never expected to be a major contributor to Microsoft s bottom line, the failure of the device in the market is more about hurting their pride, says Carolina Milanesi, vice president of research in mobile devices at Gartner. (A Microsoft spokesman says it will incorporate ideas and technologies from Kin into future Windows Phone releases.)

The phone was awkwardly positioned somewhere between a basic feature phone and a smartphone, lacking some of the functionality of a smartphone but still requiring users to buy a $30-a-month data plan. Consumers may have looked at it as a high-end feature phone or a crippled smartphone, says John Breyault, the vice president of telecommunications at the National Consumers League.

While existing Kins are still on sale, consumers should watch for any further announcements about continuing support for the phone s Studio feature that backs up activity on the phone to a web-based storage service, Breyault says. Prices are being slashed, but consumers should keep in mind that a new operating system is launching later this year, so you might want to wait on the Kin to at least test-drive Windows Phone 7, he says. Because the phone launched so recently, consumers who already bought a Kin may still be within their 30-day money-back guarantee window with Verizon Wireless, Breyault says. Even those who just passed that window could still consider calling the company to see if they can get a break on a new phone, he says.

Like many companies, Microsoft has had its share of flawed product launches, says Colin Gillis, a senior technology analyst at BGC Financial. That s in part due to having some futurists and dreamers as part of its corporate culture, but the quick decision to pull the plug on the Kin is part of a broader change going on within Microsoft which is less artsy, more bottom-line focused, Gillis says. I don t expect more of these types of anemic launches coming out of Microsoft in the future, he says.

Here s a look back at some of

Microsoft s other less-than-successful product launches

:

1995

Launched in the mid-90s, Bob was an attempt to create a friendlier user interface for the personal computer. The main interface was a house, where Bob and other cartoon characters lived to help users with basic computing tasks. Bob s legacy included the universally loathed Microsoft Office animated paperclip, and the marital fate of project manager Melinda French, who later became Melinda Gates, says Ross Rubin, the executive director for industry analysis at the NPD Group, a market research firm.

What was interesting was they actually had the right idea in trying to develop a user-friendly interface for PCs, says Tim Bajarin, the principal strategist for Creative Strategies, a technology industry consulting firm. At the time Bob was introduced, PCs still weren t cheap enough for mainstream consumer use, Bajarin says.

1994 and 2003

Bill Gates has been high on tablets for more than a decade now, I think, says Toan Tran, an analyst who covers tech companies at Morningstar. Products like the very early tablet WinPad stumbled in part because the Windows paradigm didn t lend itself well to tablet use, Tran says. Another tablet-style product, the Smart Display, was designed to allow users to remotely access their PCs from elsewhere in their homes through a touchscreen device, Rubin says. It may have been ahead of its time, but it was also too expensive for a mainstream consumer device, he says.

2004

Microsoft s Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) devices ran a service called MSN Direct, which sent weather reports, news headlines, and other small bits of information over an unused FM radio band. While the service was available on some GPS devices, the quintessential SPOT technology was a watch, analysts say. A large, expensive watch that could tell you the temperature. The challenge with SPOT was that increasingly consumers turned to their handsets for glanceable information, says Rubin. These smart watches seem to be an example of Microsoft having underestimated the competitive forces working against new initiatives, Rubin says. The SPOT watches are no longer on sale, and the MSN Direct service is available only through Jan. 1, 2012.

1997-2001

Microsoft has introduced a couple of products that attempted to tie in with consumers televisions. The TV Photo Viewer, for example, allowed users to save photos on a floppy disk and then connect a floppy disk drive to a TV to view the pictures. It was certainly after the heyday of the floppy, Rubin says.

The Photo Viewer was behind the times, but the company was ahead of its time with the 1997 purchase of WebTV, a company that was creating technology that would essentially connect TVs to the internet, similar to products that Google and other companies are promoting now, Bajarin says. To be fair, a lot of companies in the PC industry often will have one or two products that they bring out that were way too early and never really caught on, he says.

2009

The Courier tablet project was the subject of much tech-world gossip, but ultimately was killed before it reached consumers perhaps a sign that Microsoft is becoming more disciplined in its project launches, analysts say. With two touchscreens, the Courier likely would have had to be an expensive product, and could also have had a short battery life. Like the Kin, the Courier might have suffered from being targeted at too-narrow a market essentially, graphic designers or other creative professionals who want a digital sketchbook, Rubin says.