Return To Sendo
Published: 13 Nov 2002 17:23 GMT
Thursday 7 November, 2002, is a date that'll go down in mobile phone history. Sendo, the UK's only mobile phone manufacturer, announced that it was cancelling its Z100 Windows-based smartphone, 18 months after announcing it and just a fortnight after launch. Instead, we should expect a Symbian equivalent late next year. What happened? Nobody's saying -- and, unusually for this business, the clamp on leaks seems watertight. All we can hear is the heart-chilling swish of leathery wings as lawyers congregate on rocky outcrops: there are terse statements and wild rumours, but nothing that goes any way towards explaining this remarkable turn of events.
Most of the facts are clear: Microsoft bought a significant stake in Sendo, and Sendo agreed to produce a Windows Powered Smartphone mobile. This was announced in February 2001, with a launch date tentatively scheduled for the autumn of that year. The product got launched a year late and sank immediately, with Sendo saying, "if we could have done anything else, we would have."
Canning a product immediately after launch isn't unheard of, but it's very rare. It's certainly very un-Microsoft, which produces dogs but lets them quietly expire rather than do anything as corporately embarrassing as cancelling them. And Sendo has consistently impressed by its lack of stupidity, showing instead a strong understanding of the worldwide market in low-cost mobile phones. It's not got much of a name at home, but it's a good company. The cancellation of the Z100 writes off huge investment, is a public admission of failure and has caused goodness what complications with clients and suppliers. And of course with Microsoft, which must be absolutely seething with corporate rage.
The Sendo engineers aren't among the weeping, oddly enough. To be sure, it's not nice having a project cancelled and they now have a lot of free time on their hands -- apart from placing Amazon orders for Symbian programming books -- but as sources close to the soldering irons said: "Nobody ever got dissed for falling out with Bill Gates." Whatever it's like making mobile phones the Microsoft way, it doesn't inspire much love from the hewers of code. They're not sorry to see it go. The hardware bods are similarly unconcerned: the Symbian Sendo isn't going to be that different to the Z100. Same chip set, some details changed. And nobody's worried for their jobs: whatever Sendo's up to, it's not bailing out of the game.
So whatever upset the apple cart, it wasn't the hardware. The market for picture-taking, games-playing, data-guzzling whizzy mobile phones is as hungry for new product as ever, so it's not that. And if the cancellation's not down to Sendo being as mad as a cow in a spacesuit, that leaves just one factor. Our question becomes not "what happened?" but "what on earth did Microsoft do to annoy Sendo so much?"
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