Less than 50 days after Microsoft launched Kin, its pair of phones for the social-networking set, and less than 24 hours after I wrote "Microsoft Kin Price Cuts Likely Mean Sales Trouble," the company announced the project's demise.

"We are integrating our Kin team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from Kin into future Windows Phone releases," reads the Microsoft statement currently drifting around the Internet.

Verizon had recently slashed the price of the stubby Kin One, previously marketed at $49.99, to $29.99 with a two-year plan; the rectangular Kin Two, formerly $99.99, was lowered to $49.99. In addition to making calls, the phones also posted regular updates from their users' social network; but there were no third-party apps, no Flash support for the browser and no games.

What killed the Kin?

Even before the phones met their ignoble end, analysts pointed out a possible Achilles' heel: the cost of the monthly data plans. At $69.99 for unlimited calling (the Cadillac option) or $39.99 for 450 minutes (the lowest possible), plus $29.99 for data, the options were likely too expensive for parents unwilling to spend a monthly $70 to $90 on their kid's phone--and not many teenagers self-generate enough income to spend that sort of money lightly.

Despite that, the speed of Kin's death suggests still another factor at work. In late May, Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division underwent a massive shakeup, one that saw the departures of both Robbie Bach, the unit's president, and J Allard, its senior vice president of Design and Development. The division is devoted to Microsoft's consumer-centric endeavors, including the Xbox franchise, Zune media player and the Kin.

In the wake of that shakeup, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promoted Senior Vice President Andy Lees to head the Mobile Communications Business, reporting directly to him. According to his official bio, Lees is not exactly a fun-and-games sort of guy; in his previous iterations at Microsoft, he served as corporate vice president of Microsoft Server & Tools Marketing and Solutions Group, and held a variety of positions in the company's Worldwide Sales and Marketing and Services Group.

A June 30 posting on Engadget, based on information from a "reliable source" within Redmond, suggests that Lees had been involved with the Kin long before his May promotion, originally instructing everyone involved in the project to "go back to the drawing board and rebuild the OS based on Windows CE." This was after some initial work had been done to create a phone that leveraged both cloud and social-networking capabilities. The OS shift apparently forced an 18-month delay in the Kin's release schedule, during which time Verizon cooled on the project's prospects.

So while Microsoft launched Kin with a heavy marketing campaign--including a Twitter feed and a Facebook page, and 30-second television spots seemingly every five minutes--Verizon was allegedly less than enthused about pushing the devices. Poor sales would have aggravated the situation even further.

You could chalk the Kin up as yet another failed tech product, and move on; but Engadget's source suggests the whole situation could have a negative effect on the upcoming Windows Phone 7.

"Our source says that the fallout from this troubled partnership is that Microsoft has backed away from Verizon as a Windows Phone 7 launch partner," adds the post, "claiming that the first handsets you see won't be offered on the CDMA carrier--rather that we should expect GSM partners to get first crack."

The failure of Kin is something that Microsoft--not to mention the Entertainment and Devices Division--could probably absorb with relatively little net loss. But if Microsoft encounters speed bumps in the ramp-up to Windows Phone 7, its smartphone-franchise revamp, then the company has a potentially epic problem on its hands.