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Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

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Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#21

Post by pcurve »

gjolund wrote: post #15
an4rchy wrote: post #7

Amazon 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".

BWC - business worship culture.

He who holds the purse string holds the power.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#22

Post by blinkingled »

rifung wrote: post #18
blinkingled wrote: post #12

I 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…

>reason was so that people would think it's high end, and not dismiss it as a low/mid range phone.

Wow, that is whole another level of disconnect with reality!

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#24

Post by AjithAntony »

dlubarov wrote: post #10
pkinsky wrote: post #4

I can't wait for pallet-loads of fire phones to hit the market at scrap metal prices.

No need to wait! Amazon lowered the price to $130 today - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC0USA6 It still comes with a year of Prime membership, so if you're a Prime customer anyway, it's essentially a $31 contract-free phone. I wonder if it's an aggressive attempt to acquire some users, or if they've given up on the product and they're just getting rid of inventory?

One could value the headphones and charger at $20, so an $11 phone!

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#25

Post by umeshunni »

dmoy wrote: post #17
rifung wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Moreover, it's very likely that these are hardware engineers, not SWEs.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#26

Post by spydum »

dlubarov wrote: post #10
pkinsky wrote: post #4

I can't wait for pallet-loads of fire phones to hit the market at scrap metal prices.

No need to wait! Amazon lowered the price to $130 today - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC0USA6 It still comes with a year of Prime membership, so if you're a Prime customer anyway, it's essentially a $31 contract-free phone. I wonder if it's an aggressive attempt to acquire some users, or if they've given up on the product and they're just getting rid of inventory?

interestingly, I just had one in my cart, and now they are "currently unavailable".

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#28

Post by bluepostitnote »

gjolund wrote: post #15
an4rchy wrote: post #7

Amazon 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".

Those "idiots" are now the ones that learned an expensive set of lessons to apply to that v2

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#30

Post by NoCulturalFit »

gjolund wrote: post #15
an4rchy wrote: post #7

Amazon 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".

Yeah, saw the same thing with the good devs at Nike :-/
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