The Fire phone debacle

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.

Can't do them in an app. Both of those things are possible in a web browser on an iPhone.

I can even watch the movie in the Amazon Instant Video app, but I'm not sure I could stand a whole movie on such a tiny screen.

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.

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.

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.