Read the entire Microsoft-Watch blog posting here:  Windows Phone 7 Issues Could Mirror Kin's

It's time for the Kin autopsy.

Days after Microsoft discontinued its social-networking phone, much of the blogosphere is alight with competing theories over what killed the project, and what its demise means for the company's overall fortunes in the mobile space. Is Kin's death evidence of larger dysfunction within Microsoft? How exactly does someone blow the equivalent of a medium-size country's defense budget on a device that sold so poorly? And how many units did Kin sell, anyway?

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber is claiming a "well-placed little birdie" told him that Microsoft sold 503 Kin phones before the plug was unceremoniously pulled. As pointed out on sites like Pocketnow.com, though, there are 8,810 "monthly active users" of the Kin Facebook application, for which you need either the Kin One or Kin Two. However--as yet someone else helpfully suggested--at least a portion of those users could be Microsoft employees, meaning the number of actual devices sold at retail and subsequently present in the wild could be far, far less.

Imagine spending $150 million to make a summer blockbuster, and you sell only $200.50 in tickets. You can understand why a number of Microsoft employees, at least according to Mini-Microsoft, are reportedly walking around this week feeling embarrassed. In any case, Kin is dead--but nonetheless continues to overshadow Windows Phone 7, scheduled to debut near the end of this year.

Personally, I think Windows Phone 7 faces a challenge (or a problem, if you want to frame it more negatively) similar to the one that killed the Kin phones. Kin died because it was overpriced, and lacking in a number of features that appealed to its target demographic; limited in its abilities, it was marooned and left to shrivel in a harsh environment--one where, for roughly the same price as Verizon's prohibitive monthly plan, you could get an actual smartphone on which you could run actual third-party applications.