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The Fire phone debacle

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Re: The Fire phone debacle

#141

Post by [deleted] »

qq66 wrote: post #123
potatolicious wrote: post #64

Earlier 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,…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#142

Post by blueskin_ »

As son as I saw the fire phone, I knew it'd fail. It's an Android phone without any of Android's advantages, weak hardware, and the only purposes it seemed to serve is to facilitate users buying more stuff from amazon (imagine that!).

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#144

Post by unepipe »

mgkimsal wrote: post #126
potatolicious wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

if you like to read, the kindle paperwhite is amazing. so much better than reading on an ipad or iphone, and you can carry/instantly download so many books/pdfs you find online (browser button automatically sends it to your kindle)/etc... Great for reading, actually benefits the customer.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#145

Post by puredemo »

saosebastiao wrote: post #130

This 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 differ…

That sounds pretty different from the scenario the article outlined, with Bezos working directly as the product manager..

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#146

Post by nailer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #122
maherbeg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's done with an AWS secret key, which is effectively your password to the AWS API, and not a limited use token.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#147

Post by mschuster91 »

nailer wrote: post #146
mschuster91 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's done with an AWS secret key, which is effectively your password to the AWS API, and not a limited use token.

I know that, still people have managed to commit their passwords, ssh keys and more to github.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#148

Post by zrm »

potatolicious wrote: post #64
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,…

> 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.

The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship you one. That sort of thing isn't the problem because it's actually useful.

As an example of what they're doing wrong, Amazon is charging the same 30% in their app store as Apple and Google. They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats. That would get more apps in their store, get all the app developers promoting their devices and put pressure on Apple and Google to charge lower rates to anyone including Amazon who wants to sell content to people locked into the competing app stores. Their competitors look like profiteers if they don't respond and lose revenue if they do.

They're trying to enter a market and beat the incumbents at their own game when they could be making them play Amazon's game instead.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#149

Post by simonh »

ewzimm wrote: post #120
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #78

In my opinion, Amazon should have gone with a generic budget phone to augment their "Amazon Basics" line of dependable, economical cables, USB hubs, and so forth. I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a yea…

I have seen so many people blame Amazon for not including Google Play, but this is really Google's decision. In order to use Google Play Services, you need to make all of Google's services default and unremovable. This was done specifically so companies like Amazon could not include it on devices meant to push competing services. Even though I use plenty of Google software, I am more than happy to see them have compe…

I don't understand why that would be a problem. Pre-installing Google's stuff is a fair price to pay for getting a full-up Android OS for free.

Amazon's goal should be for it's apps and services to be fully competitive with everyone else's regardless of what phone they are on - iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy, Fire, shouldn't matter. I really don't see what the problem is with having Amazon's apps and services installed on the phone by default right alongside the ones from Google. Let the user decide. If users tend to prefer the Google stuff to Amazon's then they're not going to buy an Amazon locked-in Fire phone anyway.

Amazon's problem is that their apps don't come pre-installed on anyone else's phone by default. Making their own Fire phone solves that problem. It doesn't solve the problem of making Amazon's apps actualy competitive with everyone else's. That problem can only be solved by actualy making their apps good and desirable. If they aren't, locking Fire phone users into them isn't going to help sell any Fire phones and therefore isn't going to help gain exposure for Amazon's apps anyway.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#150

Post by pja »

potatolicious wrote: post #67
throwaway1x7q wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 pullin…

I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day

I just wanted to pull this bit out and highlight it in dancing neon.

3 hours of meetings per day? Not even in a single block? It's astonishing that anything got done at all!

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