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Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

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Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#111

Post by Crito »

knappe wrote: post #74
blinkingled wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Hardly. The adage 'You get what you pay for' has been proven to have real consequences. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/january18/shiv-011806.htm...

It is a great deal of disconnect. You can't just make a veblen good by slapping an outrageous pricetag on shit. It has to at least pretend to be a quality product.

If the world worked like that, then you could open a hotdog shop, sell hotdogs for 100USD each, then expect a Michelin star rating.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#113

Post by jon-wood »

bduerst wrote: post #95
megablast wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. If you are a designer, you can go work on another project. If you are a BA, you can go work on another project. If you are a manager, you can go work on another project. If you are an mobile developer/hardware engineer, and they aren't building any more OS/hardware, they can't move you onto another project.

Amazon produces mobile apps for other platforms, and is shipping hardware like Alexa. If anything, these layoffs seem to correllate with some of the commentary in the recent NYT article about Amazon.

Theres a difference between making mobile Apps and making a mobile OS. Keeping people with those skills on to work on the Amazon Android app feels to me like hiring Linus Torvalds because you want to release a Linux version of your software.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

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".

Because the issue that wasted the money are the ones making decisions about who stays and goes, so, naturally, they stay, and the serfs go.

That is rather the whole point of positions of power and influence.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#115

Post by Marazan »

volaski wrote: post #42
tsunamifury wrote: post #19

I 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 p…

Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company tr…

Or maybe Bezos personality is great for running an online retailer and bad for producing consumer devices.

From personal experience The Kindle Fire is a dreadful device.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#116

Post by grogenaut »

nine_k wrote: post #61
megablast wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could almost be talking about Steve Jobs there.

It just so happened that Jobs's companies were mostly highly (sometimes obscenely) profitable, while Amazon stays very near profitless for last ~20 years, having to re-invest all its proceedings.

Yeah next went gangbusters

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#117

Post by codeonfire »

seibelj wrote: post #33
walterbell wrote: post #6

> Still in the works is a high-end computer for the kitchen—code-named Kabinet—designed to serve as a hub for an Internet-connected home and capable of taking voice commands for tasks like ordering merchandise from Amazon.com. Will this be a competitor to the Google router?

It's amazing that Amazon thinks a useful feature is "ability to purchase stuff from Amazon faster". I don't make my decisions about products based on 1 touch ordering of supplies. If it solves a problem I have, great, but I certainly don't have an "Amazon ordering problem".

You have to understand that the company makes most of its money by selling stuff. One of the easiest ways to get your project approved there is to say "we'll increase sales by xx million." If you just tell the executives that you want to make a speaker voice thing or reorder button thing that customers will probably want a whole lot you won't get approval.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#118

Post by codeonfire »

amaks wrote: post #67

I might be missing something, but why lay off engineers as opposed to moving them to other divisions/groups? As a punishment for a screwed up product?

Management usually thinks engineers are expendable, re-hire-able, and fungible. They think they will just hire some new ones if a need arises.

Re: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

#119

Post by Animats »

It's not that the Kindle was bad. It's that the e-reader market sector was absorbed by device integration into more general devices, phones and tablets.

The killer was the growth of "fat phones", which moved into the Kindle's screen size range.

Oh, right, they also made a phone.

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