Microsoft's Kinect Turns Into a Blockbuster -- For Real
Given the attention Apple (AAPL) iTunes selling music of the Beatles and Facebook creating a new messaging platform, you might have missed the following. Microsoft (MSFT) has had some success in selling Kinect, its wireless interface for the Xbox 360. Actually, "some" doesn't do it justice. The company says that it sold its first million units -- in 10 days. And it expects to sell more than 5 million by the end of the year.
It's easy to dismiss Microsoft as stodgy and slow in addressing the mobile market (and getting people to buy Windows Phone 7 fast enough), but realize that Steve Ballmer and his management team have just created a product with the fastest adoption rate ever. Faster than DVDs. Faster than the iPad. Pay too much attention to the mobile space and you may miss Microsoft turn the entire concept of user interfaces upside down. Yes, Microsoft. Not Apple.
It was just over a month ago that market watchers declared the iPad to have the fastest adoption rate ever, after selling a million units in under a month and 4.5 million in its first quarter:
This sales rate is blowing past the one million units the iPhone sold in its first quarter and the 350,000 units sold in the first year by the DVD player, the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product.According to Bernstein Research, that would have made the iPad the 4th largest consumer electronics category with sales of $9 billion.
Kinect doesn't come close to the iPad's low end price of $499, but the units are far more impressive. It took Apple nearly a month to sell a million iPads. By 80 days, it hit the 3 million mark.
Kinect went on sale November 4. If Microsoft hits its goal, that would mean at least 5 million units in under 60 days, easily making it the fastest adopted non-phone piece of consumer electronics. And that's without units hitting most of Asia until later this week.
This is more than just a gaming story, and more than some kind of imposed contest on Apple and Microsoft. Behind the fast purchases is a combination of gamer fervor -- too large to discount -- and the fact that there's finally a really new way to control a computer. (Here's a review of the system by my BNET colleague, Damon Brown.) That has some amazing repercussions:
- Microsoft has already begun to consider using Kinect to deliver advertisements in augmented reality.
- Using such an interface could eliminate the need to find where you put the television remote. In fact, delivering and controlling entertainment becomes completely different.
- Digital signage takes on new possibilities, with displays engaging people by allowing them to interact.
- Corporate managers could have a different and possibly more natural way to move through data to get the information they want.
- Workers could control factory systems without the possibility of spilling coffee on a keyboard or touchscreen.
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Image: Courtesy, Microsoft