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The Fire phone debacle

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Re: The Fire phone debacle

#61

Post by tdicola »

guiomie wrote: post #59

"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,…

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#62

Post by tonyarkles »

guiomie wrote: post #59

"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,…

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#63

Post by sliverstorm »

dperfect wrote: post #42

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 g…

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#64

Post by potatolicious »

bambax wrote: post #57

> 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…

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#65

Post by fidotron »

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#66

Post by chuckcode »

aroch wrote: post #38
chuckcode wrote: post #18

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. [1] http://www.macstories.net/stories/a-discussion-about-apples-...

Google[1] and Amazon[2] also charge 30%... [1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... >You receive 70% of the payment [2] http://gameservices.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/inapp... >developers earn 70 percent

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.

[1] http://www.macstories.net/stories/a-discussion-about-apples-... [2] https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#67

Post by potatolicious »

throwaway1x7q wrote: post #37
fosk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why it's inaccurate?

- 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…

> "- 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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#68

Post by devindotcom »

georgeecollins wrote: post #45
devindotcom wrote: post #15

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?"…

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. It's easier to just say, "That's a good idea."

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.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#70

Post by mark-r »

nailer wrote: post #40
devindotcom wrote: post #15

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?"…

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 pric…

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.
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