Windows Phone Thoughts: Sharp is a Victim of KIN's Death As Well

"One of the biggest loosers in the Kin debacle that hasn't been talked about is Sharp. OEM for the Kin, and the biggest cellphone brand in Japan....but not in the states of course. Kin was supposed to be their entry point into the US market for mobile. Sharp ponied up half the ad $ for the Kin launch...basically subsidised it with the thought it would be good for their brand and they would sell a lot of phones and be a trojan horse for other Sharp Mobile efforts in the US. Big fail. Not only did they have to tool up factories custom design hardware and sub the marketing they only sold a few thousand phones at best. Sharp's taking a huge bath on this one. And because Sharp's mobile group is in Nara Japan and had no people on the ground in WA or Palo Alto...they had little leverage or insight into the US market and got taken for a ride. I'm sure there are a lot of unhappy execs in Osaka right now cause of this..."

I've spent more than a few minutes reading 100+ comments on this Mini Microsoft post that we already linked to, and boy, it's quite the read. If you if you throw out half of what's there, the rest that's left is staggering. The comment I quoted above was quite interesting in that no one has mentioned Sharp in all this mess - and as you can tell from the comment, Sharp has indeed lost big. They bet on Microsoft, and Microsoft burned them - badly. Is that really something Microsoft can afford to do that given their weak position in the mobile market?