This has classic Amazon politics written all over it. I'm pretty far removed from anything Kindle/Fire related, but this was my best guess at what happened based off of the Amazon I know:
Jeff said make a phone (probably like 5 years ago). They pulled orgs apart and mashed them into this superorg with several VPs and dozens of Directors, with the software teams in Seattle but the hardware folks in a completely different city, and then told them to work it out. In the course of working it out, the hundreds of cooks elbowing each other in the overcrowded kitchen resulted in delay after delay, with the final feature set being a mashup of 40 different director's flagship bullshit-o-tron that they expect to be promoted for (OMG...everybody is gonna think useless 3D stuff that kills the battery is so coool...I can't wait to be reporting directly to Jeff!!!). Come crunch time, the product managers all schedule their SDEs to show up to a 2 hour meeting so they can discuss the same exact plan to ship on time that they discussed yesterday for 2 hours.
Now that it is a dud, nobody wants to touch it, so all the Directors/VPs migrate laterally to different orgs (or quit) and then rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the bug list grows bigger by the day, a handful of software engineers go crazypants optimization on a non-bottleneck feature, and all the sane people just hope for a day where we can forget about it all and focus on some other new whizburger.
Sounds about right. There's only room for one iconoclast at Amazon: anyone showing resistance to the crazy ideas Jeff came up with would be shown the door. You just don't understand, man: Jeff has a ...vision... and he's never been wrong!. It may be time for a strong board of directors who can reign in the ego a little before we get any more projects reminiscent of Lucas' later films.
My predicted scenario was off mark, based on the article, but what surprised me about it was how much Jeff acted exactly like every Director, VP, and SVP that I'm familiar with (with a handful of suggestions). Being in the supply chain, I've seen Jeff exactly zero times in the entire time I've been here (we're not exactly the flashiest part of the company). But you could have taken almost every instance he was mentioned in this article, replaced his name with Jeff Wilke or Dave Clark, and it would have sounded just as correct.
The funny thing about Amazon culture compared to other corporate cultures is that there isn't much of a Negative Selection going on. You can generally be assured that a VP is going to be exceptionally capable and intelligent. The caveat is that they are also going to be a Yes Man, because their boss demands that respect, and they will require that their own direct reports be Yes Men. It is a culture with hundreds of Stalins...extremely talented technocratic leaders that are right most of the time and wrong a handful of times, but where subordinates are deathly afraid of being contrary in the instances where their boss is wrong.
> When Bezos insisted that the original 2007 Kindle include a cellular connection so customers could download and access e-books from anywhere, people thought the idea was an exorbitant flourish (...) When Bezos encouraged a free-shipping initiative, executives pushed back, nervous about its impact on earnings. (...) So when it came to the Fire Phone, says one former product lead, "Yes, there was heated debate about whether it was heading in the right direction. But at a certain point, you just think, ‘Well, this guy has been right so many times before.’"
It must be extremely hard/impossible to challenge Jeff Bezos when you're... well when you're not him.
However, the examples given here of Jeff being right, are about features that benefit customers (at a cost that some people thought was too high).
But the problem with the 3-D functionality wasn't that it was costing the company too much. It was that nobody could figure out how it would be useful -- at any cost for Amazon, or the customer.
I remember the videos promoting the Fire phone with random people saying "wow"... they reminded me of the Windows Vista videos, with random people looking out their window and staring at deer in the morning sun.
If you have to pay actors to say "wow" in a video maybe there's a problem.
Right on - the biggest (and IMO only truly relevant) reason why the Fire Phone flopped is because it doesn't benefit customers.
The Fire Phone wasn't built to be a superior phone, or give customers something truly new and useful. It was built to be an Amazon Content Delivery Device.
This is a phone whose primary raison d'etre is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. It's a distillation of a platform strategy, not the desire to produce a genuine product.
Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.
> Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.
The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship you one. That sort of thing isn't the problem because it's actually useful.
As an example of what they're doing wrong, Amazon is charging the same 30% in their app store as Apple and Google. They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats. That would get more apps in their store, get all the app developers promoting their devices and put pressure on Apple and Google to charge lower rates to anyone including Amazon who wants to sell content to people locked into the competing app stores. Their competitors look like profiteers if they don't respond and lose revenue if they do.
They're trying to enter a market and beat the incumbents at their own game when they could be making them play Amazon's game instead.
The Kindle Fire tablets are also designed to sell Amazon content, but they benefit the customer with their rock-bottom pricing which the Fire Phone did not have.
I have one of the original Fire tablets, and would not buy another one if not for the express purpose of delivering Amazon content - videos in that case, since the actual reading experience is far superior on a real Kindle. It's not a bad tablet, but not having the Google apps, as well as something relatively close to stock Android, makes it not as useful as it could have been.
They also benefit from the fact that tablets (at least in my experience) are primarily content consumption devices, whether that's books, videos, or games.
Well... the kindle was pretty much just a device "to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon." But there were no other competitors at the time. The fire phone was going up against a huge market of phone devices with many better features and ecosystems already.
I would argue Kindles benefit the consumer in that they're also enjoyable reading experiences. You can carry a library's worth of books in your backpack on a device with a wonderful screen.
if you like to read, the kindle paperwhite is amazing. so much better than reading on an ipad or iphone, and you can carry/instantly download so many books/pdfs you find online (browser button automatically sends it to your kindle)/etc... Great for reading, actually benefits the customer.
In my opinion, Amazon should have gone with a generic budget phone to augment their "Amazon Basics" line of dependable, economical cables, USB hubs, and so forth.
I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Such a device might not sell 20 million units in the first week, but it would sell a heck of a lot better than the Fire Phone did. Heck, I would have bought one. I went with a Nexus 5 just a couple of months ago, after the very pricey Nexus 6 was announced. There's a good market for a vanilla, plain Android phone, and Prime would make it a no-brainer.
The article makes Bezos sound a bit over-controlling and zany, but at least the author hastens to add that second guessing Bezos and Amazon is a risky business. Who knows? Perhaps the Fire 2 will get it right. (I hope Jeff's reading this!)
I have seen so many people blame Amazon for not including Google Play, but this is really Google's decision. In order to use Google Play Services, you need to make all of Google's services default and unremovable. This was done specifically so companies like Amazon could not include it on devices meant to push competing services. Even though I use plenty of Google software, I am more than happy to see them have competition. They honestly do not have enough, and I am glad Amazon is working to offer an alternative to total Google control on Android. Android is fine now, but increasing centralization is not going to benefit anyone but Google. Acquiescing and becoming just another company pushing Google services would be a terrible move for Amazon.
I'm surprised that so few other people on this comment thread seem to get it. Google Play and the associated Services ecosystem exists for the sole purpose of forbidding exactly what Amazon is trying to do. Amazon's sole purpose for this phone is as a way to get phone customers into their ecosystem first, and Google's stuff exists to get people on the Google ecosystem first. A first-party device with Google Play and Amazon services is Not. Gonna. Happen.
"Google Play and the associated Services ecosystem exists for the sole purpose of forbidding exactly what Amazon is trying to do"
Er... are you sure android apps for gmail, calendar, drive, youtube, maps etc. and not to mention, the play store for android exist for the sole purpose of blocking third parties? Surely they have their own utility to users... no?
I actually wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. They already don't allow third-party app stores (like Amazon's app store or F-Droid) on the Play Store last I checked; in both cases, you have to enable app installation from "untrusted sources" and download/install the APKs manually.
Android licencing means that no company is allowed to ship both Google Android and non-Google Android. This means that to ship Google Android on the phone they (Amazon) would have to ship Google Android on all Fire tablets too.
In addition under the licence Google apps need to be both installed (you have to have all of them, you can't pick and choose) and placed in particular prominent locations (so the Play Store needs to be on the first home screen). This would almost certainly mean that Google's store(s) would be have as good if not better positions than Amazon's own stores on the device. More than that there are restrictions around app stores which compete with Google play which would, at the very least, restrict Amazon's ability to pre-install and operate their own app store.
Given that Amazon's reason for making these devices in the first place is to sell content - videos, music, books and apps - stock Android is to all intents and purposes a non-starter for them.
I don't understand why that would be a problem. Pre-installing Google's stuff is a fair price to pay for getting a full-up Android OS for free.
Amazon's goal should be for it's apps and services to be fully competitive with everyone else's regardless of what phone they are on - iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy, Fire, shouldn't matter. I really don't see what the problem is with having Amazon's apps and services installed on the phone by default right alongside the ones from Google. Let the user decide. If users tend to prefer the Google stuff to Amazon's then they're not going to buy an Amazon locked-in Fire phone anyway.
Amazon's problem is that their apps don't come pre-installed on anyone else's phone by default. Making their own Fire phone solves that problem. It doesn't solve the problem of making Amazon's apps actualy competitive with everyone else's. That problem can only be solved by actualy making their apps good and desirable. If they aren't, locking Fire phone users into them isn't going to help sell any Fire phones and therefore isn't going to help gain exposure for Amazon's apps anyway.
I agree with you, and my point is simply this: AMZN should just sell a Nexus clone and be done with it. Does GOOG actually discourage phone makers from using their services? I don't think so.
Nexus is a reference design. So, I'll just copy Nexus but bundle Amazon Prime with it. What's not to love? So AMZN has to bundle their Amazon App or whatever on the phone; that's a given.
Unless, of course, GOOG has decided to actually make money off the Nexus phones, as indicated by their Nexus 6 pricing. But that's just opening up a market for a less expensive clone to be the logical replacement for the Nexus 4/5.
The whole point of the exercise is not to just ship volumes of units, but build an ecosystem (just like what Apple and Google are doing too). A budget phone doesn't work because it won't be geared up to play the music and video and all of the other traits Amazon is looking at with it's 'Fire' ecosystem.
> Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Again, the point here is NOT to let the customer choose, it's to force the consumer into their ecosystem instead of Googles.
Switching costs are high, so getting people hooked into the Amazon Appstore might mean a lifetime customer, etc. One of the reason Amazon has designed Fire Tablets for children.
And this is another reason the Fire Phone is having a hard time - developers think the Amazon AppStore is shit.
Everyone keeps implying there are super cheap super good chinese phones. Is there a site that reviews these or a link where an uninitiated can check the best options out?
They've all gotten good reviews for their hardware.
I don't think it's crazy to expect that Amazon could build a really solid "Basics" phone at around $200 - $250, since their competitors all do so with reasonable margins to spare.
I bought my phone from aliexpress last year. Since then, Haipai Noble has had 3 major versions, and a dozen minor hardware updates.
Decide on price, and find reviews online of popular Chinese phones. Make sure the have the hardware features you want at the price you want. And then follow safe buying rules. Don't buy from low sales vendors, nor bad scored vendors.
there are super cheap phones with okish hardware, but software is universally SHIT, from broken functions, lazy implementations, to malicious rootkits and spyware in factory roms
To expand on this, if the phone isn't particularly well-known, then you'll end up on your own if you want to replace the ROM/firmware with, say, CyanogenMod, since there won't nearly be as much development/porting momentum as there would be for a household-name device.
Well, to be fair, we don't think it's shit, we just don't think there are enough potential customers for the investment. It's not just "build to another store" - my servers have to have yet another push notification service route, I need to coordinate another App Store release schedule, I have to implement another IAP framework, implement another signing path, and buy and test another set of devices.
That's money, baby. Lots of it. And unlike Mr. Bezos, I don't have thousands - let alone millions - of dollars to burn.
It's the same reason we don't build to Windows app store or Blackberry app store without incentives from Microsoft or Blackberry to help get us there.
It's not just developers they need to convince. Even moderately sophisticated customers aren't going to want to buy into a not-as-good-as-Google's ecosystem.
Because it's pretty strictly worse than Google's Play Store. Some developers do go to the extra effort to support it, but not all, and almost none would create for the Amazon store without publishing on Google's.
> A budget phone doesn't work because it won't be geared up to play the music and video and all of the other traits Amazon is looking at with it's 'Fire' ecosystem.
A "budget phone" in price may not be a budget phone in capability. Amazon surely wouldn't be the first company with a loss-leader hardware device that encourages lock-in.
> I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
If they'd actually done this, it'd probably be a pretty good competitor to the Nexus 6, which is not a bad phone at all but departed quite a bit from the precedent of the Nexus 5, other than running stock Android. (Huge, very expensive.)
The Android market is ripe for a true successor of the Nexus 5, and Amazon would have made a lot of sense to fill that niche. The best thing we've got right now is the 2014 Moto X, which admittedly is a very good phone.
Yep. The power button on my Nexus 5 just went up and I had the choice of throwing money at a 14-month-old phone (which is a bit sooner than I had hoped to replace it but old enough that I had to think twice about paying for maintenance) or buying a new phone. Nexus 6 at $650 and in a larger form factor than I would like got me to buy a Moto X instead. $200 cheaper and in a more reasonable size made it the closest thing to a Nexus 5 replacement I ran across.
I would have gladly considered something from Amazon if it had been along the lines of an updated Nexus 5 (under $400, stock or virtually stock like the Moto X) even if, like the Nexus line, it sacrificed a bit of that premium "Cadillac" polish like the wooden back and metal edged frame. Only reason I even bothered with that is because there wasn't a cheaper Nexus that wasn't the year+ old N5.
Hell...don't even bundle gapps if you want to include the Amazon store...just as long as someone can build AOSP for it and I can install it myself.
When the Nexus 7 came out it was roughly equivalent to the Kindle Fire in terms of price and specs but other than fellow Android fans and tech site readers, I didn't know anyone else who bought a Nexus 7. Everyone I knew who wanted an affordable (read: cheaper than an iPad) but functional small tablet bought Kindle Fires so clearly their brand awareness and marketing is worth something if people were willing to buy an slightly inferior device for $50 more.
I have one, its called the Moto G. It comes with near stock Android, it costs $200 without a contract, and I freaking love it. To see the future of cell phones look at the story PC's: prices will fall and quality will become uniformly high- and margins will become razor thin, except for premium brands (aka Apple). This is a tough, tough kind of market for any company to enter.
I agree, but I think "budget" is the wrong concept.
It should've been "simple smartphone".
5 big buttons on the screen: (a) Phone, (b) Text / Email, (c) Music (d) Pictures, (e) Shop
(each of those apps linked into to Amazon services)
There is not really a market for making another hi-tech whiz-bang phone for nerds, that market is sewed up.
They need the phone version of their kindle. A one-week battery life. A device deceptively simple...something that soccer-moms would use while waiting for Timmy's soccer practice to finish.
Interestingly, I bet this is the tact Microsoft takes with their new Nokia announcements
I'd get this too, providing they really did just make a no bullshit phone with stock Android and no stupid skin like HTC and Samsung phones. I've been using Nexus phones for a number of years, but looking for alternatives now that Google has jumped on board the 'we don't know the fucking difference between a phone and a tablet' bandwagon. An extra app store in addition to (definitely not instead of) would be fine, and I'd probably use it.
Let's be honest, no one (rounding down) cares about vanilla android and microSD ports.
The only thing that's going to move the dial for an Amazon phone is exclusive hardware or software features and you can forget about third party software. They tried this angle and because they aren't that good at this in the first place (like Facebook), what they came up with stank.
When I attended the launch, they had a hands-on period where I noticed a few of the issues people have pointed out in reviews. But every phone has issues.
More worryingly, I asked about a few things that the unique tech in the Fire Phone could be used for - nothing groundbreaking, just little suggestions: "It'd be great to have the tilt controls do ____ here" or "Do you have plans to allow users to turn this on/off?" Things like that. Almost all were met with a "wow, no, I don't think so, we haven't looked into that at all."
I don't mean to suggest I'm some sort of UX genius or anything, these were just ordinary features one would expect to have been considered (and possibly rejected) based on everything Apple, Google, and Microsoft have done to advance the state of the art. Amazon hadn't given a moment's thought to any of them! Combined with the other stuff they tend to do in their original hardware, it cemented my thoughts that there's some kind of weird naivete pervading their entire hardware process, and no one to even recognize it, much less address it.
I was pretty sure from the second I was given the phone to hold that it would be a dud, but felt it was possible that ingenuity might save the day. Unfortunately not the case, and it's too bad because there's so much cool stuff in there!
It's really weird. The FireTV voice recognition is innovative and in practice works incredibly well. Also the box is delivered already configured to your account. Both those ideas are so good they're retrospectively obvious, and you wonder why Apple and Google never did them. I'd buy it again at twice the price.
But the Fire phone? Ugly, overpriced, and nothing that's new is useful. I wouldn't buy it at half the price.
I've never seems company release two things so dramatically different in approach at around the same time before.
Given that all his attention was riveted to the phone, I wonder how much input he had in the FireTV product? Maybe the hands-off approach just worked better.
FireTV was a much, much easier product to develop. It was pretty clear an Android STB was worth doing. In this case, Amazon wisely took the simplest path to get there: Google TV + better content deals and updated hardware and software.
Apple and Google have had voice recognition for years.
Pre-authentication seems insecure.
The Fire Phone is priced high with the assumption that the price will be lower with carrier contracts, a la iPhone and Galaxy. Although, if they get the price down, it could become the "free" phone like old iPhones are.
Just because it's preconfigured with your account doesn't mean it doesn't need a password. My iPhone has my account on it but I still need to type in a code.
And tokens can be abused or stolen (given they're not stored or paired with other tokens/keys residing inside a TPM), we have seen numerous cases of people hijacking others' AWS accounts and using them for mining bitcoin, of all things.
Very true but what is the cost to Amazon if it's stolen? They regularly refund thousands in EC2 fees when people check their keys into github. I'm sure there's a loophole where they don't have to pay rights-holders for stolen works and the cost to stream movies is pretty low at their scale. My guess is that the hardware would be the biggest loss for Amazon in the stolen TV crime. It's also pretty easy to crack the case unless the thieves are using a stolen wifi signal too.
My guess would be that the person you were talking to didn't know the backstory of a particular issue, or didn't want to bring it up. I have seen people demo products I have worked on field a comment like: "Why didn't you do X?" The person demoing may know why we didn't do that (cost/ time/ tradeoff) or know that it is a 1.1 feature.
I've certainly experienced that too, but I didn't get the impression that was the case this time. They had some devs and leads there IIRC, and were answering questions competently.
One big problem I've seen at Amazon is that their tendency towards independent interacting subsystems carries over onto their culture with regards to their hardware.
One team was probably in charge of the camera/3d bit, and they worked on their own while everybody else made their generic implementations of required smartphone features ABC.
I see this all the time, features are planned and implemented without even communicating the fact to another team, when even the briefest pause would have led to the realization that it had enormous implications for them.
I worked on the camera/3d bit, and I can say with good certainty parts of the UI were stubbed out only for integration purposes. When a feature was good enough to dogfood, it was in the builds all the testers got.
Amazon seems to have truly become the Walmart of e-commerce, and I'm not just talking about what the company does (commerce), but rather what the brand represents.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Walmart and Amazon have proven that if you dominate the supply chain landscape and offer a huge variety with low margins, you can do moderately well (i.e. stay in business). But with so much being essentially commodity goods and services (physical and digital), you really can't expect higher margins. So Amazon lives on, even after 20 years in the business.
But with that much history and branding (intentional and unintentional), you really can't expect to create demand for your own premium products - competing with companies that have spent the same amount of time (decades) marketing themselves as design-driven, high quality, premium brands.
It appears that Amazon expects to pull a complete 180 with their brand overnight, as if a product itself (if it's "cool enough") can negate and rise above 20 years of commodity reseller branding.
Sounds a bit like the lone hacker who expects their next mobile app to explode with popularity just because it exists and might have a small edge on the competition. Except in this case, Fire Phone didn't even have an edge. Still, I'm convinced that even if it had been better than the iPhone (or whichever best Android phone) in almost every way, it still would have been doomed for failure.
No one brags about getting the Walmart version of something. The same could be said for Amazon.
I do respect the company's efforts to take "bold" risks. I also really want Amazon to succeed - I'm a very happy Prime and AWS customer, and I think their hardware is actually pretty good. I just wonder if the big bets would be better placed on products and services that better align with the brand they've created already.
Personally I don't think they are trying to become the next big hardware manufacturer. I think they are making the Fire devices to drive consumption of Amazon services, similar to how Google made Android to drive usage of Google services (and made Nexus devices to drive Android).
Which means they don't need to be a huge hit in the device market, and they don't even necessarily need the device division to be profitable.
The biggest clue to me is the Kindle e-reader. It seems obvious they created the Kindle to drive Amazon book sales. Doubly so with the incredibly aggressive price reduction generation-over-generation.
The problem for amazon that strong competition is appearing. Walmart is starting to take ecommerce seriously. And growth is declining(maybe they are related ?) .
And i don't think this is exactly overnight. Prime, and amazon's customer service are good examples of amazon trying to build a "love" brand.
To some extent it could be a desperate move by bezos - because what if in the future people will prefer to do their ecommerce via phones ?
Or any other of the popular value brands like Ikea, Target, Old Navy, Southwest, H&M or Honda. Amazon is perceived as utilitarian, but that's not inevitable for a value retailer.
There's a fundamental mismatch. Jeff Bezos wants to be perceived as cool, cutting edge, an explorer, an innovator. These are elitist concepts that work for a premium, aspirational brand. Value brands need to come across as ordinary people.
I love Amazon to death. I have no idea what you mean by "Amazon version of something", but I just purchased an MS ergo keyboard from them a few weeks ago instead of going to best buy.
As far as I'm concerned there is no "Amazon version of something", there's simply an amazing service providing so much value that I'm more than happy to wait a few days to get it from Amazon than to buy it retail.
Wow, did not know about that! What a shame that Amazon didn't go with the dual e-ink/LCD idea, given that they're practically singlehandedly responsible for e-ink going mainstream.
Throw in free-with-Prime, Android, and a few carrier discounts (e.g. free data for a year) and I'd happily dump my iPhone in a heartbeat.
Shouldn't it be possible to create an e-ink display behind a transparent LCD? Then you wouldn't need to flip anything anymore. I'm guessing that the backlight might be a problem, but maybe that could be integrated with the e-ink as well.
what a cool idea. It's hard to know how the user experience is without using it (eg. do you have to flip it back and forth manually often?), but the benefits of having an e-ink panel seems huge.
It was a huge flop, but I wonder how much of a problem that really is for Amazon. They'll keep trying until they hit something that works for them. And they don't make their revenue from devices - a phone flopping would be an unmitigated disaster for Apple. For Amazon I'm not sure why it's anything more than a slight embarrassment. (Well, I guess a series of flops could damage their brand to the point that future efforts are doomed simply by association. That would be bad.)
The article seems to be making the point that this is an indicator of something wrong at Amazon but I am extremely skeptical of that. I think they just try stuff and see what works.
This article really reminded me how much Apple screwed up to let Android get a foothold. Look how unassailable the Apple and Android are now -- you can't get a foothold at the bottom of the market because it's hugely fragmented and there are no profit margins, while at the top of the market you're taking on beloved brands and have to try crazy over-the-top bets to get in the door -- which usually backfire.
Android could have been the Fire Phone of its day. The earliest Android phones were just amazingly bad compared to the iPhone. But iPhones were only available on AT&T. Do you live in an area where AT&T had no service? Your only choice was an Android. iPhones insisted for years on having exactly one clearly unpopular screen size. Want a 4" screen? Your only choice was an Android. Apple refused to develop a downmarket phone. Want something less than a flagship? Your only choice was an Android.
That window has closed. iOS has finally filled in all the places it used to suck (well, maybe except for developing an economical model, but last year's phone looks better now than it used to, and in any case Android filled that niche to the overflowing).
Apple didn't screw up. The disadvantages you cite are inevitable consequences of the strategy they consciously chose (selling premium devices differentiated by user experience).
If Apple hadn't waited until carriers (especially Verizon) to come to them, iPhones would be as full of branding and bloatware as any other carrier-sold phone, not to mention interference with updates, interference with retail launches and who knows what else. Limiting the range of phones they offer means they miss niches, but also helps control costs (allowing them to use premium components more affordably), simplifies the buying process for customers, supports a broader and deeper accessory ecosystem and so on. Not jumping on many new technologies (e.g. LTE), creates an opening for competitors, but also lets Apple avoid the associated growing pains so they can provide a more consistent user experience.
If Apple had followed the path you advocate, they'd have picked up many of the disadvantages of the Android ecosystem, without the corresponding advantages (most notably rapid improvements via intra-ecosystem competition). That seems obviously worse than the path they actually chose.
They certainly chose their strategy consciously -- it was just a bad strategy, relative to the counterfactual.
Apple was wise to launch on just AT&T, you're right that it did in fact let them create the (clearly very popular) experience that it did. But once the iPhone was a mega-hit, they went 4 years before getting Verizon in on the game. That was a huge mistake, and Apple clearly had the power to negotiate a pure iPhone experience with Verizon and get out of its exclusivity contract with AT&T far before 2011.
Certainly getting onto LTE early and increasing screen size earlier than they did would have provoked little missed steps in their UI and general experience -- and once Android was an entrenched competitor, perhaps that was exactly the right decision, since purity of user experience is a core part of the iOS versus Android value prop. But back when the Android user experience was just purely awful, it's pretty hard to argue that the iPhone would have been materially hurt by a few little grinding points. The Motorola DROID wasn't released until Nov 2009, and I had one of those -- it was clearly far, far behind the iPhone of the time in terms of UI.
If Apple had followed the path I described, the iPhone might well be materially worse now than it actually is -- but it would also have 80%+ market share with no serious competitor, rather than 21% market share.
Indeed, it's hard to figure they screwed up too badly when according to Canaccord Genuity's autumn 2014 estimates, Apple took 86% of the handset industry profits.
I used to think they'd missed an opportunity by not dominating the lower end of the market too like they did with the ipod but I think a big issue would be having the apps and software run on their phones. They are after all a software platform and if you produce cheap crap phones then the whole business of just being able to download an app and run it on your Apple phone breaks as the cheap phones may not be up to it. You'd then end up with different software and marketing efforts for the different phones and before you knew it you'd be Nokia.
The earliest Androids, like the HTC Incredible, were about the same size as the iPhone. There's plenty of people who prefer the configurability Android's had for years. Some people are turned off by Apple because the perception of hipsterness. Apple chooses to not compete with downmarket (they also are losing MacBook sales to $349 Toshibas). I say all this as an Apple enthusiast (laptop, display, mouse, 6plus, iPad Air all in front of me ... I'm on my 4th MB, 4th iPad, and 6th iPhone), but I clearly see why someone wouldn't buy an iPhone, and I don't think Apple could have easily altered that reality, nor would they necessarily want to.
Bold or irresponsible move? Not sure. Given the incredibly low profit margin of most non-iphone smartphones on the market today (I think the average samsung profit margin on a phone is $11) I can't help but wonder what the real source of revenue was planned to be.
Increased shopping through mobile? Make your android/ios products better?
It just never made any sense, but I guess many successful products don't make initial sense either.
More and more digital content consumption is happening on mobile devices. And Amazon can't sell on iOS devices because Apple locks out anyone who won't pay a 30% ransom.
You can't buy a book or rent an instant movie on an iPhone. It is a big weak spot.
My iphone isn't apple.com. It is mine. I'm not asking apple to make sure I can get amazon products. I'm asking them not to go out of their way to make sure I can't.
Imagine if Microsoft would only allow software on windows that it approved and got 30% ransom.
Not paying Apple or Google a cut of every product sold via mobile was the revenue plan. If I pay Apple 30% of my profits every time someone orders something via my mobile app, that's a lot of money I can sink into a competing product before it becomes a net loss (assuming I get any traction at all).
> Not paying Apple or Google a cut of every product sold via mobile was the revenue plan. If I pay Apple 30% of my profits every time someone orders something via my mobile app, that's a lot of money I can sink into a competing product before it becomes a net loss (assuming I get any traction at all).
I think the article discussed this mainly in the context of Kindle. It's only digital in app purchases that need to go through Apple's payment processing.
Of course it's for increased shopping through mobile. My daughter bought a Kindle and she admitted her ebook purchases have increased tenfold. Others have told me similar.
I'm deathly afraid to get one for the same reason.
Frictionless purchases and vertical channel integration makes perfect sense to me.
My ebook purchases also skyrocketed after I got a Kindle. But it didn't rise because the kindle made it easy to buy ebooks, or even because I prefer ebooks (for technical stuff, I actually don't). It's because I was reading a lot more. I went from 1 or 2 books a year (if even) to 1 to 2 books a week.
My experience is anecdotal, but it might be worthwhile to ask your acquaintances why they buy so many ebooks after buying a Kindle.
I don't get the Fire phone at all. iPhone users are never going to switch to it. Can't see Android users switching either. I appreciate that they tried some new things such as Firefly (although that is apparently available on iOS/Android, as it should be), the gestures and some of the other UI differences. But the 3D stuff is lame and the overall aesthetic is dreadful.
The Kindle is apparently doing well and makes perfect sense.
And 2 of my new favorite gadgets are Fire TV (vocal search is the way to go) and Echo (very well done an a no-brainer at $99).
ps I got my Fire phone for $199 no-contract with free year of Prime ($99 net unlocked).
The Kindle does so many things right but like many of Amazon's products leaves me shaking my head and asking "what are they thinking?" Case in point is the Special Offers, or ads shown on the Kindle. Initially I kind of liked them, especially when they would occasionally just throw you $5 off your next Kindle purchase or make me aware of new books. But the lack of targeting became so annoying. I had so many ads for titles I already purchased for the Kindle, and so many annoying ads for things like toilet paper and home security monitoring that I lost quite a bit of respect for Amazon and the utter lack of optimization they did around Special Offers.
They are thinking that they are making a somewhat cheaper device for people who don't have the capacity to lose respect for a corporation over a lack of ad-targeting.
You say that as if it were some kind of moral failing. I bought the version with ads not because I want to be specially targeted by ads, but because it was cheaper and the ads are not intrusive and don't bother me. I use my Kindle to read books, not to get shopping tips. The only reason an ad would annoy me is if it intruded on my attention while I'm reading my book. They can try to sell me pink panties while it's off for all I care. If they're not targeting correctly, that's their problem, and it is no skin off my nose.
It says that's the price with a contract. So it's not really $0.99, it's $0.99 plus a monthly installment you agree to pay over the next two years, which will be rolled into the rest of your wireless service charge.
US cellular providers have very opaque pricing so it's hard to tell how much those installments really are. But usually when you have the option to buy a phone with or without a contract, the spread's $400-$500. That strongly implies the real price is about $401-$501, amortized over 24 months.
Long story short, using the perverse mathematics of United States mobile phone pricing, the £200 you're finding is about 3/4 of the $0.99 the article says Americans are paying.
I quoted the article. It does make a correction of sorts at the end. The full sentence:
>"Originally priced at $199 (with contract) and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory."* //
So they are comparing '99c' to '$199 (with contract)'.
Meh, I should know better than to expect realistic reporting.
[to avoid any doubt I'm not disagreeing with you in any way]
Exactly, it's a stupid thing to say. It currently sells for "$450 on a 2 year contract" - this is why people end up paying insane amounts for mobile phones.
"Have you seen my phone, it was free." [ie £45 a month for 2 years]
It used to be that you paid for the phone, then you paid for service. You can still do that, if you're prepared to pay $400-$1000 for a phone. (Except Google's Nexus 4 was reasonably priced.)
But the usual method for the last decade was that you paid for a 24 month contract, and pay a lump up front that paid for the differentiation of the low-end phones (free, or 99c, or $50) from the high end phones ($100 - $300). The rest of the price was invisibly wrapped into the contract -- and there would likely be a hefty early termination fee if you wanted to walk away from the contract.
Recently, phone companies have been trying to extract even more money by offering a non-contract service contract (cancel any time, no fee) along with a rent-to-own plan on the phone (pay a chunk up front, then after 24 payments it's yours.) For some reason this does not result in a discount for the service plan...
In the US there are generally only two levels: the subsidized price and the full price. If you get a phone with a very cheap contract, you will have to pay full price, just as if you got no contract at all. Such people might therefore prefer a prepaid plan. If you get a phone with a "normal" (in UK terms, "expensive") plan, you get the subsidized price for the phone. There's usually no gradation beyond that...although people who spend huge amounts of money on their monthly bills due to long distance calling, roaming, etc., will receive extra promotions (we're talking $1000/month customers).
The other commenter is correct, it's $0.99 with a 2 year contract to ATT. It's $450 off-contract, though it was briefly $200 off-contract late last year.
So one product didn't pan out during its first iteration. Not exactly the end of the world.
This also makes me wonder if they are rolling out the Echo the way they are because of Fire Phone. Invitation only and a (presumably) demand-driven supply chain.
It's not that they can't make an occasional mistake, it's that they can misjudge things so poorly. What were they expecting people to do with this device? ("Oh man, I'll give up my iPhone and its ecosystem so I can get 3d home screen.")
Kindle, echo, etc. were decent in their first iteration and provided some value.
"In October, Amazon shocked shareholders when it reported a $437 million net loss for the quarter, its biggest in 14 years."
Please pardon my ignorance on Accounting. I don't have basic Accounting 101 knowledge, but please help me understand this. If I, as an individual, loose certain amount of money, it is most likely from my savings. Otherwise, it must be on my credit card, which means, I lost the bank's money. Eventually, I need to repay.
How can a company that hasn't made much profit over the years, loose $437 million? If it hasn't made profit, it has no savings. Clearly 'someone' is giving Amazon credit. I assume its the investors. But in what form does Amazon borrow money? Does Amazon issue bonds and raise money? Does it issue more shares/stock? In short, how is Amazon getting so much money and loosing it in each quarter.
When people say Amazon is not profitable, they mean "not very profitable". With their enormous revenue, they still generate enough money to maintain a pile of billions of dollars:
My feeling on the Fire phone was just that they build the wrong phone for their audience. They built the Moto X when they should have built the Moto G.
There is a market for a really solid Android phone for say $150 off contract. Amazon could have partnered with any number of prepaid providers and also normal providers to have "the best deal in wireless".
They built a whole market around driving down prices and reaching a mass audience, then they compete with top end phones. If the Kindle Fire was $500, it would have flopped. The $600 Fire Phone DID flop.
It feels like Kindle tech's value proposition is quality technology at an unbeatable price. The Fire Phone didn't hit that at all.
>Clearly, Amazon isn’t yet on the same side of the "loved" spectrum as the brands Bezos named in his memo. Devoted fans of Apple, Nike, and Disney will spend any amount of money just for a small taste of their products and culture. Amazon certainly isn’t in the same camp as supposedly "unloved" brands like Walmart—far from it. But Amazon just isn’t as cool or beloved as Bezos might hope.
People also fall out of love, as they have done at one point or another with many of the examples mentioned here. Be essential, that' s much better.
When it comes to phones, Amazon was in a great situation. It didn't have any baggage in terms of older models. No risk of cannibalizing existing models if the new phone is superior. It completely knew the strenghts and weaknesses of its competitors. All it had to do is plug the weaknesses and provide something which is superior. Something whose uniqueness lies not in useless 3-D gimmicks but solid features which other leaders are overlooking.
For example:
1. Provide a truely great display. This is not necessarily to trump others but something which is just a must. The display is the face of the phone.
2. Provide two SD card slots. Which market leading phone has them? None. With 2x128 GB sdcards (which also happen to be sold by Amazon) and say, 64 GB internal storage, the user gets 320GB of storage. On a phone. Unique? Yes. Useful? Hell yes.
3. Provide two SIM card slots. Granted, there are a whole bunch of phones that provide them but usually not in a phone with 320GB storage.
4. Massive 4000mAh battery. Make the phone slightly bigger, say 5.5 inches to manage heat. As numerous very successful large phones have proven, a big display is not a bad thing for a lot of people.
Without getting into the drawbacks of not latching into the Play Store ecosystem, the hardware i.e. the product itself would have generated so much positive buzz.
Unfortunately, focusing on solid and useful features is often overlooked and in case of Amazon, it squandered a great opportunity.
Provide two SD card slots. Which market leading phone has them? None.
Because people don't want them. Very few people would use or want 320GB of storage on their phone.
Provide two SIM card slots.
Also a feature only wanted by a tiny minority of users.
If Amazon made the phone you describe it would be a huge hit with a tiny minority of users. They'd be passionate about it, but the vast majority if people wouldn't care.
I have a Fire Phone. I couldn't resist, when they were $199 and include a year of Prime (which I already pay for), it's $100 for a quite high end piece of hardware. And, the hardware actually is really great. Camera is great, display is great, touchscreen is great. 2GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. It's very high end phone hardware at a very low end phone price.
That said, it's an awful phone. The OS feels clunky and old. The 3D stuff is, as mentioned in the article, gimmicky and pointless. Firefly is just annoying (it seemingly pops up at random, as if to say, "Hey, wanna buy something? You should totally buy something."). The interface, where it has diverged from Android, is confusing as hell. Menus pop up when you rock the phone, or shake it, or something, I dunno. It just randomly pops stuff up sometimes and I don't know why or how to replicate it. The status bar is disabled by default and the launch screen is more limited and frustrating than the original launch screen on the G1 (the first Android devices). Camera comes up every time I try to adjust the volume because the buttons are right next to each other. This also seems to be a trigger for Firefly...maybe. I honestly don't know how Firefly is called into existence, but it's popped up dozens of times since I've owned the phone, none of which were times I wanted it.
Amazon built the phone Amazon wanted. It's not a phone designed around customer needs/wants, at all. They even pulled out a bunch of functionality for seemingly no reason other than they want people to buy more things from Amazon. For example, you can't use your music on the device as a ring tone or alarm (a feature that has existed in Android approximately forever). But, Amazon will sell you ring tones.
It is possible to sideload the Google Play Store, which is one redeeming characteristic of the phone...so, I have GMail, Firefox browser (which is not in the Amazon store, but can also be sideloaded), calendar, docs, etc. But, it's still not a pleasant phone experience. The UI is needlessly opaque, and the unique features of the phone are pointless or annoying. The unique features are also not at all discoverable. I didn't know Firefly could recognize music and art, that's kinda neat. I don't know how to use any of the buttons and movements to make the phone do things. They seem nearly random when I try to use those features, which is quite frustrating.
I gave it, I think a 3 star review, at Amazon, on the strength of the hardware, the very low price, and the fact that Google Play Store can be sideloaded relatively easily. But, I would never recommend it for someone who isn't a tinkerer. It's just too confusing, and the native apps (for email, maps, etc.) are weak.
Edit: And perhaps the most frustrating thing is that there is no back button. You have to do a swipe gesture from the bottom (the very bottom, or it scrolls instead) of the display. I sometimes find myself having to attempt this a half dozen times to make it work. It is incredibly frustrating; and worse, I find myself doing it on my Nexus 7 (which has a back button and doesn't respond to this gesture). It's training me to be their kinda stupid.
Interesting review. I haven't tried the fire phone and hadn't considered what would happen when amazon tried to redo the UI. I find the UI on amazon incredibly cluttered and nonsensical and sounds like the phone is similar in nature.
It's not cluttered...but, it is nonsensical. You could almost say there is no UI on the Fire phone. Status bar is hidden by default, and only visible when you tilt the phone "just so". There is no back button or menu button. The "home" button has been returned to physical form on the Fire phone (it is the big button on the front bottom center of the phone, like an iPhone, I guess), which is fine, though the home screen is uselessly simple...it has a HUGE slider of the most recently used apps (takes up 2/3 of the screen) and 4 app icons on the bottom (I guess you're only supposed to use four apps regularly). There aren't multiple desktops where you can keep other frequently used apps. You always have to go to the full app list, which is just stupid.
The UI is minimalist, and non-configurable, to the point of feeling like a feature phone.
So I take it there is no custom stock Android ROM available for the Fire phone? I only found a fake Android L ROM. You can root it, though, a fairly recent development apparently.
I haven't looked into that yet, and am hesitant to go that route, as it often means giving up some features...sometimes important ones. My old Sensation 4G never got a new ROM because WiFi and the camera were non-working with Cyanogenmod; I rooted it and stipped it of all of its T-Mobile and HTC shovelware, but it kept its default OS.
I didn't need to root it to get the Google Play Store side loaded, so I haven't looked into that, either. That said, if I can't figure out how to replace the awful launcher/home screen on this thing, I may eventually give it over the to CM gods (or whatever custom ROM comes along). I would like my back button, as well.
Edit: this conversation led to me googling how to replace the annoying launcher...it was as easy as installing Google Now Launcher. I just reduced my dislike of my phone by another large measure. Now, if I can just get the back button to come back, the stupid tilt functions disabled, and google maps to work right, this might turn out to be a decent phone.
Amazon's simplified big picture strategy is the application of perfect execution to dominate a market. They're really good at it. They optimize the whole process from the website, to the box magically appearing at my door two days later. For books and food and ebooks and "stuff" in general, I find that ability to perfectly execute rather important, and they get lots of my business. They're the kings of detail orientation. Process failure is not an option.
They thought they could execute perfectly on designing and shipping phones. I believe they can. The problem is the market for phones doesn't care about flawless execution. Legendarily the existing network providers suck and the existing phones aren't too great either but people love them anyway and never make their buying decisions based on who's most likely to ship on time or least likely to crash.
They would fail exactly the same way if they tried to sell fast food or American cars or car insurance, where nobody cares about quality and only want low price. They would be a huge success in something like medical supply logistics (don't they already sell stuff like that?) or aerospace (spaceX better look out)
The challenge for them is trying to sell perfect logistics, perfect performance, perfect execution in general to markets where people currently really don't care. I think they are running out of consumer markets that they don't already dominate where people care about flawless execution.
Its interesting that all the stuff I use with my phone comes from Amazon. Case, bluetooth ear piece, BT headphones, charger, cable... I'd even buy a phone from them, although I'd buy the phone I want, not a fire.
Also note they're good at shipping a variety but not good at making anything. I never want Amazon's XYZ, ever. I want an XYZ, and Amazon is the best in the business at getting a XYZ delivered to me.
E-ink is what made Amazon a device company. Copying the Yota phone seems like it would have been a better bet then going with the 3D gimmick. Yota has a really interesting product but hasn't really gained support due to a few issues (there isn't really Android SDK support for e-ink screens) that Amazon could have easily solved.
>"We’re trying to break the mold of how TV has been made for the last 75 years," Amazon Studios content chief Joe Lewis explained, before dropping a familiar Bezos trope: "It’s still Day One."
At least cable TV has a way to deliver most of the content consumers want, even if it sucks and is overpriced.
Further fragmenting the market with Yet Another Marketplace in the quest to regain that 30% only hurts the consumer IMO. I personally want nothing to do with locking myself into an ecosystem. Apple, Google and Amazon will never see my cash for eco-system specific purchases.
- team was not scrapped by jeff, at least not until large number of people walked out due to mismanagement
- prototypes that worked (and were of phone size & shape) existed more than 2 years before launch but then (as mentioned) team walked and it all had to be scrapped
- hw team often undercut sw team by replacing components and not telling anyone about it
- hw team often made mistakes of the very basic variety (two separate sets of pull-ups on a single i2c bus)
- some parts choices were motivated by personal interests of people in the hw team, even against their own data & analyses. This was allowed to proceed
- some of the management made the team look very foolish in front of vendors (asking questions that made no sense in the current millennium)
- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity
Hey there, this is the author of Fast Company's story. Thanks for the note.
While I appreciate your perspective, during the course of reporting, you have to understand that you're going to hear an endless amount of varying perspectives, especially when it comes to emotional finger-pointing and Monday morning quarterbacking. It sounds like you worked on the project for about a year, of a product with roots that can be traced as far back as 2009. It's also not clear to me what "team" you're referring to, since so many teams were involved over this long time period, not just in Seattle but in Cupertino/Sunnyvale/Cambridge/etc, as you know. So I just hope people can keep that in mind when reading about "inaccuracies," which, on the whole, I certainly would disagree with.
As for your complaints, it sounds like many of them are aimed at the hardware teams; during my reporting, I certainly heard just as many complaints leveled at the software teams (e.g. at former VP Howard Look before his departure).
I totally understand that current/former employees get defensive about these kinds of topics, especially when it comes to their work being under the eye of criticism (early Dynamic Perspective team members were especially defensive during my reporting). But it's important to separate fact from emotion, and present a narrative that is clear, accurate, and balanced.
At this point, I've talked to nearly four-dozen sources for this story -- current and former employees at all levels of the company -- and this is the story that's emerged. The feedback I've since received privately from insiders has been incredibly reassuring.
With that said, I'm not dismissing your comments. But if you'd like to provide more insight, feel free to reach out. I'm accessible online, and happy to connect on background, if that's most comfortable for you.
> "- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity"
Sounds like Amazon alright. I was there for two years and this defined so much of my time spent.
We'd have endless meetings with endless stakeholders. This would cut deeply into development time, and all scheduling revolved around PM schedules with no regard for the productivity cost of pulling engineers into meetings every other hour, all day long.
Which would of course result in more meetings to discuss why we're not shipping things quickly enough, and more meetings to remediate the situation...
By the time I left that godforsaken wasteland of a tech company I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day, all spread out naturally, because fuck concentrating and getting work done.
I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people.
So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem.
As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time.
So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day).
I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...
It is extremely difficult for large organizations to create the sort of innovative leaps that startups can create.
Amazon is attempting to do this. They have been successful in many different ways, but for every winner they create they need to create multiple losers. The fire phone seems to be one of these losers, but time will tell.
I really admire Amazon's tolerance for failure. Most large companies would never take such risks.
Another way of thinking about it is that it is extremely difficult for startups to create successful innovative leaps since most of them fail.
Amazon is more like a VC fund or an incubator than one individual startup. What's the 2014 revenue of all YC companies combined? That would be a good number to compare Amazons revenue to.
What you should really admire is Amazon's shareholders' tolerance for failure. A lot more companies would be more likely to take big risks like Amazon if their shareholders would tolerate year after year of losses. Time will tell if they are stupid or admirable.
I'm surprised at how clueless the Fire phone is described to be, given that the Amazon products I am familiar with (Kindle, various AWS services, Prime, Instant Video) are actually rather good.
With apple charging 30% of revenue [1] for in app purchases I'm sure that Bezos and others will continue to be concerned about the platform as well as the content. Might be a better strategy to partner with android than start a new ecosystem but I'm sure they want to have more control over the platform.
As stated in the original article I reference [1] and the google play developer policies [2] google/android has exceptions for goods that can be used on other devices like amazon prime movies, music, magazines, etc. That is why you can't buy new movies etc. in the amazon app on iPhone but you can on Android.
In either case it is clear that the owners of the platform don't want it to turn into a commodity like the rest of the web and want a slice of all revenue. That means that amazon will need to have more leverage over the platform and devices.
I think the missing piece of discussion here is what's alluded to in the article: Amazon, or at least a critical mass of decision makers at Amazon, want to become aspirational. It really is in the same category of Costco or Walmart, but they constantly wish they could go higher end for higher margins. The Fire Phone is a demonstration of what happens when these two worlds collide. It is a box shifter's definition of a high end phone.
I admire Amazon a lot, but this one was a misfire.
"When Bezos insisted that the original 2007 Kindle include a cellular connection so customers could download and access e-books from anywhere, people thought the idea was an exorbitant flourish that would eat into profits. But his prescience was part of what made the Kindle a smash hit." ...
Really? Anyone can back this up? I would have thought the opposite. I didn't buy the 3G Kindle because it was more exepensive, all I cared was the eink display.
Ancecdotal, but I remember when the original Kindle came out I thought exactly that. Who would want to pay more money just so you can buy a book when you're sitting at a park or coffee shop? Just give me a device I can tether to my computer and load in books like it's iTunes.
The beauty of the cell connection was that it got rid of all the pain of putting stuff on the device. My parents had no idea how to get music on an iPod, but they could easily click a buy button on Amazon.com and see their book on the Kindle within moments like it was magic.
I've got an old 3G kindle (bought second hand). It's a feature I don't really think about until I'm out at the cabin and feel like reading a book I bought a while ago. Tada! Super cool feature, although I'm not sure I would have paid extra for it when I was considering a kindle initially.
Yes, it's pretty neat. I have an old kindle refurb and just now (as a test) ordered a free public domain book and it took about 2 seconds to show up.
I think the whole point of that feature was to capture the airport book market--people facing a four hour flight have a million books to choose from instead of fifty rubbishy paperbacks.
The Fire phone is a gorgeous hardware success in my opinion -- if you try it, it's fast and sleek. The Firefly scanner is super-convenient for shopping.
The show-stopper issue for me is the UI. It feels as if screen elements are sloshing, or hard to find, and the UI is hard to use when I'm in motion.
I expect the UI will be easy for Amazon to solve.
The phone is a version 1 and a strong debut -- even if it didn't sell well.
Someone who isn't me helped work on this portion of the project. The system UI was written and re-written a half dozen times. They tried to do it internally, they tried design agencies, they tried consultants, and all failed miserably. Not because they sucked, but because the Amazon management team was nearly impossible to deal with. Developers would get conflicting requirements from multiple stakeholders, who would then argue like children. You had managers who would throw a tantrum if they didn't get a pet feature in. Etc, etc.
The last I heard, they basically downloaded the android OS, and re-wrote all of the system UI framework components. Of course, this meant that most android apps broke because they failed to make all of the options functional, so they spent somewhere around twice the time fixing issues as they did writing them.
I wonder if we'll ever see on-demand assembly of stuff like this.
Amazon doesn't have to invest anything into phones that might not get sold, just "raw materials" that get assembled into phones on demand in their fullfillment centers.
Any unassmbled processors, screens, cameras, etc. just get sold back onto the market if the phone doesn't gain success.
I wonder if we'll ever see on-demand assembly of stuff like this.
That is and has been done. Like for the Moto X, which is custom assembled if you do a custom order.
However, there is a substantial ongoing cost to keep a manufacturing line up and running for a product. If you're not currently running phones (or whatever product) every day, then you'd want to use the line space for other products. This implies setup / teardown costs and (re)training.
In general, the manufacturer would prefer to start running the product at some given volume per day, be given plenty of notice to scale up or down the volume, and then cease production and be done with it. That minimizes their costs.
Amazon should've focussed on an inexpensive handset with Amazon services for shopping built in to it, and launched it in emerging markets. This would give it a shot to get to the next billion. Heck, it could've even provided free data if a user does a certain amount of shopping on Amazon a month.
I haven't seen the fire phone yet but isn't it too early to say its a disaster. They have only just entered the market and are obviously going to get better.
But will all of Bezos’s risk-taking ultimately pay off?
"They make no money!" former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
exclaimed in a recent TV interview. "In my world,
[that’s] not a real business. I get it if you don’t make
money for two or three years, but Amazon is, what, 21
years old?"
I don't know many people who have made money betting against Jeff Bezos, or lost it betting against Steve Ballmer. (iPhone, anyone?)
despite the criticism it has some seriously cool features like firefly and 'MayDay'. Not everything has to gel in with the consumer right away. He's casting the net far and wide, and keeping his foot in the devices game. That's awesome.
As son as I saw the fire phone, I knew it'd fail. It's an Android phone without any of Android's advantages, weak hardware, and the only purposes it seemed to serve is to facilitate users buying more stuff from amazon (imagine that!).
Jeff should spilit the Amazon in to two companies, Amazon.com and Amazon Research Labs. Amazon.com will be the old Amazon and he can continue his "copy the latest gadget or trend" in Amazon Research Labs.
I think he should shut down everything and focus on AWS and Amazon.com only.
Jeff said make a phone (probably like 5 years ago). They pulled orgs apart and mashed them into this superorg with several VPs and dozens of Directors, with the software teams in Seattle but the hardware folks in a completely different city, and then told them to work it out. In the course of working it out, the hundreds of cooks elbowing each other in the overcrowded kitchen resulted in delay after delay, with the final feature set being a mashup of 40 different director's flagship bullshit-o-tron that they expect to be promoted for (OMG...everybody is gonna think useless 3D stuff that kills the battery is so coool...I can't wait to be reporting directly to Jeff!!!). Come crunch time, the product managers all schedule their SDEs to show up to a 2 hour meeting so they can discuss the same exact plan to ship on time that they discussed yesterday for 2 hours.
Now that it is a dud, nobody wants to touch it, so all the Directors/VPs migrate laterally to different orgs (or quit) and then rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the bug list grows bigger by the day, a handful of software engineers go crazypants optimization on a non-bottleneck feature, and all the sane people just hope for a day where we can forget about it all and focus on some other new whizburger.