The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful.
AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.
(Unless you're talking about the entirety of Dave Limp's organization, which produced a lot of things...)
AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.
When the Fire phone was on Fire sale, it was a pretty good value for users though. The launcher was weird, but you could smuggle Google Play store on it, and it had a good processor.
No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset.
It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.