The Fire phone debacle

For example:

1. Provide a truely great display. This is not necessarily to trump others but something which is just a must. The display is the face of the phone.

2. Provide two SD card slots. Which market leading phone has them? None. With 2x128 GB sdcards (which also happen to be sold by Amazon) and say, 64 GB internal storage, the user gets 320GB of storage. On a phone. Unique? Yes. Useful? Hell yes.

3. Provide two SIM card slots. Granted, there are a whole bunch of phones that provide them but usually not in a phone with 320GB storage.

4. Massive 4000mAh battery. Make the phone slightly bigger, say 5.5 inches to manage heat. As numerous very successful large phones have proven, a big display is not a bad thing for a lot of people.

Without getting into the drawbacks of not latching into the Play Store ecosystem, the hardware i.e. the product itself would have generated so much positive buzz.

Unfortunately, focusing on solid and useful features is often overlooked and in case of Amazon, it squandered a great opportunity.

I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people.

So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem.

As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time.

So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day).

I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...

Because people don't want them. Very few people would use or want 320GB of storage on their phone.

Provide two SIM card slots.

Also a feature only wanted by a tiny minority of users.

If Amazon made the phone you describe it would be a huge hit with a tiny minority of users. They'd be passionate about it, but the vast majority if people wouldn't care.

Imagine if Microsoft would only allow software on windows that it approved and got 30% ransom.

Apple was wise to launch on just AT&T, you're right that it did in fact let them create the (clearly very popular) experience that it did. But once the iPhone was a mega-hit, they went 4 years before getting Verizon in on the game. That was a huge mistake, and Apple clearly had the power to negotiate a pure iPhone experience with Verizon and get out of its exclusivity contract with AT&T far before 2011.

Certainly getting onto LTE early and increasing screen size earlier than they did would have provoked little missed steps in their UI and general experience -- and once Android was an entrenched competitor, perhaps that was exactly the right decision, since purity of user experience is a core part of the iOS versus Android value prop. But back when the Android user experience was just purely awful, it's pretty hard to argue that the iPhone would have been materially hurt by a few little grinding points. The Motorola DROID wasn't released until Nov 2009, and I had one of those -- it was clearly far, far behind the iPhone of the time in terms of UI.

If Apple had followed the path I described, the iPhone might well be materially worse now than it actually is -- but it would also have 80%+ market share with no serious competitor, rather than 21% market share.