"In essence, we were not building the phone for the customer—we were building it for Jeff"
Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#12I wonder if the outcome would've been any different if they had not forked the n-1 version of Android and instead shipped something like a Moto G3 with stock Google stuff combined with Amazon customizations. With a cheap price, great customer service and timely updates it would've made a dent sooner or later.
After all who wants a phone without GMail, Chrome and GMaps? Amazon didn't do anything to compensate the lack - except for may be the Silk Browser which to me wasn't anything spectacularly good compared to Mobile Chrome.
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#13Amazon fires Fire phone engineers.... /s TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
Indeed. I remember there was an article that said it wasn't even necessarily product management as it was Bezos who more or less governed the product design.
In any case, I find it a bit bizarre that they would just fire them when AWS is hiring so heavily. You would think they would just shuffle them to other parts of the org. While I was there we would get new people from other parts of Amazon that were downsizing all the time like Silk.
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#14I can't wait for pallet-loads of fire phones to hit the market at scrap metal prices.
I had to get a new phone and considered a fire-sale Fire Phone, but I figured that there would be no updates whatsoever.
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#15Amazon fires Fire phone engineers.... /s TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
Why is this always the case?
I've been on a couple of projects that were complete flops, devs are always first to go. Meanwhile the idiots who actually wasted all the money and bloated the feature set start working on version "2.0".
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#16Amazon fires Fire phone engineers.... /s TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
If they are getting out of phone, they don't need the phone engineers anymore, at least. They would be hard to re-purpose to other projects, even hardware ones (like IoT).
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#17Amazon fires Fire phone engineers.... /s TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
Indeed. I remember there was an article that said it wasn't even necessarily product management as it was Bezos who more or less governed the product design. In any case, I find it a bit bizarre that they would just fire them when AWS is hiring so heavily. You would think they would just shuffle them to other parts of the org. While I was there we would get new people from other parts of Amazon that were downsizing a…
When I interviewed at Amazon it was mostly the team I was joining doing the interview. It may be that they do not have a uniform hiring bar across all their organizations, which makes shuffling people around a lot harder.
(Maybe not impossible, but harder)
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#18I wonder if the outcome would've been any different if they had not forked the n-1 version of Android and instead shipped something like a Moto G3 with stock Google stuff combined with Amazon customizations. With a cheap price, great customer service and timely updates it would've made a dent sooner or later. After all who wants a phone without GMail, Chrome and GMaps? Amazon didn't do anything to compensate the lack…
Honestly I'd take a cheap phone with no Amazon customizations. I don't think you can ship an Android phone with Google Apps and not with the Play Store though, and I can't imagine Amazon would want that since they have their own Market to promote.
On the other hand, it wasn't like the phone was originally cheap; if anything it was priced like a high end phone. That being the case, perhaps they got too greedy.
When I was at Amazon I asked someone in upper management why they priced the phone so high, telling them nobody would buy it at that price. They said the reason was so that people would think it's high end, and not dismiss it as a low/mid range phone. In the end, I think nobody bought that it was high end.
To be honest it amazes me that people at Amazon drink the koolaid when it does so little as a company to promote company pride, compared with the other tech giant in the area, Microsoft.
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#19I flew up in First Class on Virgin to Seattle next to a key lead on the fire phone. We had a nice long talk about the project and what happened. He vehemently defended the Fire Phone and touted its great and unique aspects while I examined it and admired the hard work he put in. 3D modeling, gyroscopic-driven interactions, an universal activity feed -- some interesting stuff was there...
But there were some serious problems with it like forced promotions where users would would prefer instead functionality, useless gimmicks, and other silliness. Without fail everytime I pointed one out, the Lead looked down a bit bashfully and admitted Bezos had insisted on this nonsense.
Bezos is an blind, egotistical CEO, forcing hardworking engineers to take the fall for his naive and frankly stupid decisions. His instincts in hardware and product without fail have been downright pathetic -- and now he will to blame those who work tirelessly under him for his own failure.
Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
#20I wonder if the outcome would've been any different if they had not forked the n-1 version of Android and instead shipped something like a Moto G3 with stock Google stuff combined with Amazon customizations. With a cheap price, great customer service and timely updates it would've made a dent sooner or later. After all who wants a phone without GMail, Chrome and GMaps? Amazon didn't do anything to compensate the lack…
It was doomed from the beginning. There was zero redeeming value. high price, bland, thick, non-stock Android, 4 camera gimmick.