Ben Rudolph was back in Redmond today with a far better outcome than most people who spend a week betting in Las Vegas.
“I think it was cool for us to literally put our money where our mouth is — to show the world that we believe in the product that we built,” the Windows Phone evangelist said via phone this morning. “We stand behind it, and we weren’t afraid to go out and say, look we’ve got something great, we want to show you how great it is.”
If you’re just tuning in to this story, Rudolph spent much of the Consumer Electronics Show at the Microsoft booth, challenging CES attendees to match their devices up against Windows Phone in speed tests for everyday tasks such as checking the weather, posting to Facebook and Twitter, and snapping/sharing a photo.
Anyone who lost had to admit that their phone was “smoked by Windows Phone.” Anyone who won got 100 bucks.
In the end, all the positive publicity cost a mere $300. The final tally was 30 wins, 3 losses and one draw.
The company also gave away 15 to 20 Windows Phones to the losers of the speed tests. (Some people declined them, particularly if they had just recently gotten their phones.)
As detailed by Rudolph in this blog post, two of the losses came in snapping a photo and posting it to Twitter (on a Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4S) and the third was in a speed test for sending a text message (Droid Bionic). But in many other tasks, Windows Phone came out on top, beating the iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, Galaxy Nexus, ATT Skyrocket, Droid Charge, Droid Bionic, and BlackBerries.
Asked if the company might try this approach on a broader scale, to tout Windows Phone to the masses, Rudolph acknowledged the possibility but said his brain was so tangled after a week at the giant show that he hadn’t had a chance to think about that yet.
