Amazon should've focussed on an inexpensive handset with Amazon services for shopping built in to it, and launched it in emerging markets. This would give it a shot to get to the next billion. Heck, it could've even provided free data if a user does a certain amount of shopping on Amazon a month.
The Fire phone debacle
121–130 of 188 posts
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
All it needs is the postman confusing two packages (or the wrong phone in the correct parcel) and a stranger has total access to your account.
Do you really think the password is on the device instead of using some sort of revokable token authentication mechanism?
And tokens can be abused or stolen (given they're not stored or paired with other tokens/keys residing inside a TPM), we have seen numerous cases of people hijacking others' AWS accounts and using them for mining bitcoin, of all things.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#123> 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,…
The Kindle Fire tablets are also designed to sell Amazon content, but they benefit the customer with their rock-bottom pricing which the Fire Phone did not have.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#124I have a Fire Phone. I couldn't resist, when they were $199 and include a year of Prime (which I already pay for), it's $100 for a quite high end piece of hardware. And, the hardware actually is really great. Camera is great, display is great, touchscreen is great. 2GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. It's very high end phone hardware at a very low end phone price. That said, it's an awful phone. The OS feels clunky and…
So I take it there is no custom stock Android ROM available for the Fire phone? I only found a fake Android L ROM. You can root it, though, a fairly recent development apparently.
No one has cracked the bootloader. So no custom roms
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#125>"We’re trying to break the mold of how TV has been made for the last 75 years," Amazon Studios content chief Joe Lewis explained, before dropping a familiar Bezos trope: "It’s still Day One."
At least cable TV has a way to deliver most of the content consumers want, even if it sucks and is overpriced.
Further fragmenting the market with Yet Another Marketplace in the quest to regain that 30% only hurts the consumer IMO. I personally want nothing to do with locking myself into an ecosystem. Apple, Google and Amazon will never see my cash for eco-system specific purchases.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#126> 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,…
Well... the kindle was pretty much just a device "to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon." But there were no other competitors at the time. The fire phone was going up against a huge market of phone devices with many better features and ecosystems already.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#127This article really reminded me how much Apple screwed up to let Android get a foothold. Look how unassailable the Apple and Android are now -- you can't get a foothold at the bottom of the market because it's hugely fragmented and there are no profit margins, while at the top of the market you're taking on beloved brands and have to try crazy over-the-top bets to get in the door -- which usually backfire. Android co…
The earliest Androids, like the HTC Incredible, were about the same size as the iPhone. There's plenty of people who prefer the configurability Android's had for years. Some people are turned off by Apple because the perception of hipsterness. Apple chooses to not compete with downmarket (they also are losing MacBook sales to $349 Toshibas). I say all this as an Apple enthusiast (laptop, display, mouse, 6plus, iPad Air all in front of me ... I'm on my 4th MB, 4th iPad, and 6th iPhone), but I clearly see why someone wouldn't buy an iPhone, and I don't think Apple could have easily altered that reality, nor would they necessarily want to.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Kindle does so many things right but like many of Amazon's products leaves me shaking my head and asking "what are they thinking?" Case in point is the Special Offers, or ads shown on the Kindle. Initially I kind of liked them, especially when they would occasionally just throw you $5 off your next Kindle purchase or make me aware of new books. But the lack of targeting became so annoying. I had so many ads for t…
They are thinking that they are making a somewhat cheaper device for people who don't have the capacity to lose respect for a corporation over a lack of ad-targeting. I'm pretty sure they're right.
You say that as if it were some kind of moral failing. I bought the version with ads not because I want to be specially targeted by ads, but because it was cheaper and the ads are not intrusive and don't bother me. I use my Kindle to read books, not to get shopping tips. The only reason an ad would annoy me is if it intruded on my attention while I'm reading my book. They can try to sell me pink panties while it's off for all I care. If they're not targeting correctly, that's their problem, and it is no skin off my nose.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Well... the kindle was pretty much just a device "to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon." But there were no other competitors at the time. The fire phone was going up against a huge market of phone devices with many better features and ecosystems already.
I would argue Kindles benefit the consumer in that they're also enjoyable reading experiences. You can carry a library's worth of books in your backpack on a device with a wonderful screen.
Re: The Fire phone debacle
#130This has classic Amazon politics written all over it. I'm pretty far removed from anything Kindle/Fire related, but this was my best guess at what happened based off of the Amazon I know:
Jeff said make a phone (probably like 5 years ago). They pulled orgs apart and mashed them into this superorg with several VPs and dozens of Directors, with the software teams in Seattle but the hardware folks in a completely different city, and then told them to work it out. In the course of working it out, the hundreds of cooks elbowing each other in the overcrowded kitchen resulted in delay after delay, with the final feature set being a mashup of 40 different director's flagship bullshit-o-tron that they expect to be promoted for (OMG...everybody is gonna think useless 3D stuff that kills the battery is so coool...I can't wait to be reporting directly to Jeff!!!). Come crunch time, the product managers all schedule their SDEs to show up to a 2 hour meeting so they can discuss the same exact plan to ship on time that they discussed yesterday for 2 hours.
Now that it is a dud, nobody wants to touch it, so all the Directors/VPs migrate laterally to different orgs (or quit) and then rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the bug list grows bigger by the day, a handful of software engineers go crazypants optimization on a non-bottleneck feature, and all the sane people just hope for a day where we can forget about it all and focus on some other new whizburger.