The Fire phone debacle
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
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.
The funny thing about Amazon culture compared to other corporate cultures is that there isn't much of a Negative Selection going on. You can generally be assured that a VP is going to be exceptionally capable and intelligent. The caveat is that they are also going to be a Yes Man, because their boss demands that respect, and they will require that their own direct reports be Yes Men. It is a culture with hundreds of Stalins...extremely talented technocratic leaders that are right most of the time and wrong a handful of times, but where subordinates are deathly afraid of being contrary in the instances where their boss is wrong.
It must be extremely hard/impossible to challenge Jeff Bezos when you're... well when you're not him.
However, the examples given here of Jeff being right, are about features that benefit customers (at a cost that some people thought was too high).
But the problem with the 3-D functionality wasn't that it was costing the company too much. It was that nobody could figure out how it would be useful -- at any cost for Amazon, or the customer.
I remember the videos promoting the Fire phone with random people saying "wow"... they reminded me of the Windows Vista videos, with random people looking out their window and staring at deer in the morning sun.
If you have to pay actors to say "wow" in a video maybe there's a problem.
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.
Getting those books on the thing, however, is a pain - you need a computer to go with it.
My mom bought an early kindle - worldwide wifi, with email!
So she bought the next kindle too.
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.
That is disturbingly insightful.
That's how you know the marketing/business types are deciding the features, not product development.
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 year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Such a device might not sell 20 million units in the first week, but it would sell a heck of a lot better than the Fire Phone did. Heck, I would have bought one. I went with a Nexus 5 just a couple of months ago, after the very pricey Nexus 6 was announced. There's a good market for a vanilla, plain Android phone, and Prime would make it a no-brainer.
The article makes Bezos sound a bit over-controlling and zany, but at least the author hastens to add that second guessing Bezos and Amazon is a risky business. Who knows? Perhaps the Fire 2 will get it right. (I hope Jeff's reading this!)
If they'd actually done this, it'd probably be a pretty good competitor to the Nexus 6, which is not a bad phone at all but departed quite a bit from the precedent of the Nexus 5, other than running stock Android. (Huge, very expensive.)
The Android market is ripe for a true successor of the Nexus 5, and Amazon would have made a lot of sense to fill that niche. The best thing we've got right now is the 2014 Moto X, which admittedly is a very good phone.
I would have gladly considered something from Amazon if it had been along the lines of an updated Nexus 5 (under $400, stock or virtually stock like the Moto X) even if, like the Nexus line, it sacrificed a bit of that premium "Cadillac" polish like the wooden back and metal edged frame. Only reason I even bothered with that is because there wasn't a cheaper Nexus that wasn't the year+ old N5.
Hell...don't even bundle gapps if you want to include the Amazon store...just as long as someone can build AOSP for it and I can install it myself.
When the Nexus 7 came out it was roughly equivalent to the Kindle Fire in terms of price and specs but other than fellow Android fans and tech site readers, I didn't know anyone else who bought a Nexus 7. Everyone I knew who wanted an affordable (read: cheaper than an iPad) but functional small tablet bought Kindle Fires so clearly their brand awareness and marketing is worth something if people were willing to buy an slightly inferior device for $50 more.
> Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Again, the point here is NOT to let the customer choose, it's to force the consumer into their ecosystem instead of Googles.
Switching costs are high, so getting people hooked into the Amazon Appstore might mean a lifetime customer, etc. One of the reason Amazon has designed Fire Tablets for children.
And this is another reason the Fire Phone is having a hard time - developers think the Amazon AppStore is shit.
A "budget phone" in price may not be a budget phone in capability. Amazon surely wouldn't be the first company with a loss-leader hardware device that encourages lock-in.
That's money, baby. Lots of it. And unlike Mr. Bezos, I don't have thousands - let alone millions - of dollars to burn.
It's the same reason we don't build to Windows app store or Blackberry app store without incentives from Microsoft or Blackberry to help get us there.
It's not just developers they need to convince. Even moderately sophisticated customers aren't going to want to buy into a not-as-good-as-Google's ecosystem.
Because it's pretty strictly worse than Google's Play Store. Some developers do go to the extra effort to support it, but not all, and almost none would create for the Amazon store without publishing on Google's.
wait what? do you realize even $40 chinese phones are 2 core 1GHz with dedicated hardware decoders for every popular codec?
I bought my phone from aliexpress last year. Since then, Haipai Noble has had 3 major versions, and a dozen minor hardware updates.
Decide on price, and find reviews online of popular Chinese phones. Make sure the have the hardware features you want at the price you want. And then follow safe buying rules. Don't buy from low sales vendors, nor bad scored vendors.
$350 Nexus 5 http://www.google.com/nexus/5/
$250-ish - Lumia 1320 https://www.cricketwireless.com/cell-phones/smartphones/noki...
$200 - ZTE Grand X Max http://www.androidcentral.com/hands-zte-grand-x-max
$180 - Motorola G http://www.motorola.com/us/Moto-G-2nd-Gen/moto-g-2nd-gen-pdp...
They've all gotten good reviews for their hardware.
I don't think it's crazy to expect that Amazon could build a really solid "Basics" phone at around $200 - $250, since their competitors all do so with reasonable margins to spare.
It should've been "simple smartphone".
5 big buttons on the screen: (a) Phone, (b) Text / Email, (c) Music (d) Pictures, (e) Shop
(each of those apps linked into to Amazon services)
There is not really a market for making another hi-tech whiz-bang phone for nerds, that market is sewed up.
They need the phone version of their kindle. A one-week battery life. A device deceptively simple...something that soccer-moms would use while waiting for Timmy's soccer practice to finish.
Interestingly, I bet this is the tact Microsoft takes with their new Nokia announcements
But I'm not buying a Fire, obviously.
Does Google forbid 3rd party app stores on a device with full Google Services installed?
Er... are you sure android apps for gmail, calendar, drive, youtube, maps etc. and not to mention, the play store for android exist for the sole purpose of blocking third parties? Surely they have their own utility to users... no?
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.
Nexus is a reference design. So, I'll just copy Nexus but bundle Amazon Prime with it. What's not to love? So AMZN has to bundle their Amazon App or whatever on the phone; that's a given.
Unless, of course, GOOG has decided to actually make money off the Nexus phones, as indicated by their Nexus 6 pricing. But that's just opening up a market for a less expensive clone to be the logical replacement for the Nexus 4/5.
Android licencing means that no company is allowed to ship both Google Android and non-Google Android. This means that to ship Google Android on the phone they (Amazon) would have to ship Google Android on all Fire tablets too.
In addition under the licence Google apps need to be both installed (you have to have all of them, you can't pick and choose) and placed in particular prominent locations (so the Play Store needs to be on the first home screen). This would almost certainly mean that Google's store(s) would be have as good if not better positions than Amazon's own stores on the device. More than that there are restrictions around app stores which compete with Google play which would, at the very least, restrict Amazon's ability to pre-install and operate their own app store.
Given that Amazon's reason for making these devices in the first place is to sell content - videos, music, books and apps - stock Android is to all intents and purposes a non-starter for them.
See here: https://www.theinformation.com/Google-s-Confidential-Android... for more information.
The only thing that's going to move the dial for an Amazon phone is exclusive hardware or software features and you can forget about third party software. They tried this angle and because they aren't that good at this in the first place (like Facebook), what they came up with stank.
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?" Things like that. Almost all were met with a "wow, no, I don't think so, we haven't looked into that at all."
I don't mean to suggest I'm some sort of UX genius or anything, these were just ordinary features one would expect to have been considered (and possibly rejected) based on everything Apple, Google, and Microsoft have done to advance the state of the art. Amazon hadn't given a moment's thought to any of them! Combined with the other stuff they tend to do in their original hardware, it cemented my thoughts that there's some kind of weird naivete pervading their entire hardware process, and no one to even recognize it, much less address it.
I was pretty sure from the second I was given the phone to hold that it would be a dud, but felt it was possible that ingenuity might save the day. Unfortunately not the case, and it's too bad because there's so much cool stuff in there!
But the Fire phone? Ugly, overpriced, and nothing that's new is useful. I wouldn't buy it at half the price.
I've never seems company release two things so dramatically different in approach at around the same time before.
Google does do this if you buy from the Play Store, FWIW.
Pre-authentication seems insecure.
The Fire Phone is priced high with the assumption that the price will be lower with carrier contracts, a la iPhone and Galaxy. Although, if they get the price down, it could become the "free" phone like old iPhones are.
> Pre-authentication seems insecure.
Do you mind explaining how? Because I can't see it.
Personally I'll take that risk any day over having to type my password in using the remote.
Very true but what is the cost to Amazon if it's stolen? They regularly refund thousands in EC2 fees when people check their keys into github. I'm sure there's a loophole where they don't have to pay rights-holders for stolen works and the cost to stream movies is pretty low at their scale. My guess is that the hardware would be the biggest loss for Amazon in the stolen TV crime. It's also pretty easy to crack the case unless the thieves are using a stolen wifi signal too.
It's easier to just say, "That's a good idea."
One team was probably in charge of the camera/3d bit, and they worked on their own while everybody else made their generic implementations of required smartphone features ABC.
I see this all the time, features are planned and implemented without even communicating the fact to another team, when even the briefest pause would have led to the realization that it had enormous implications for them.
https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12ld3fwhlnexv5b004...
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 goods and services (physical and digital), you really can't expect higher margins. So Amazon lives on, even after 20 years in the business.
But with that much history and branding (intentional and unintentional), you really can't expect to create demand for your own premium products - competing with companies that have spent the same amount of time (decades) marketing themselves as design-driven, high quality, premium brands.
It appears that Amazon expects to pull a complete 180 with their brand overnight, as if a product itself (if it's "cool enough") can negate and rise above 20 years of commodity reseller branding.
Sounds a bit like the lone hacker who expects their next mobile app to explode with popularity just because it exists and might have a small edge on the competition. Except in this case, Fire Phone didn't even have an edge. Still, I'm convinced that even if it had been better than the iPhone (or whichever best Android phone) in almost every way, it still would have been doomed for failure.
No one brags about getting the Walmart version of something. The same could be said for Amazon.
I do respect the company's efforts to take "bold" risks. I also really want Amazon to succeed - I'm a very happy Prime and AWS customer, and I think their hardware is actually pretty good. I just wonder if the big bets would be better placed on products and services that better align with the brand they've created already.
There's a fundamental mismatch. Jeff Bezos wants to be perceived as cool, cutting edge, an explorer, an innovator. These are elitist concepts that work for a premium, aspirational brand. Value brands need to come across as ordinary people.
And i don't think this is exactly overnight. Prime, and amazon's customer service are good examples of amazon trying to build a "love" brand.
To some extent it could be a desperate move by bezos - because what if in the future people will prefer to do their ecommerce via phones ?
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.
As far as I'm concerned there is no "Amazon version of something", there's simply an amazing service providing so much value that I'm more than happy to wait a few days to get it from Amazon than to buy it retail.
I suppose it's similar to Wal-Mart doing the same thing in the 90's (I think? I'm too old).
Wonder if Amazon could buy them?
Throw in free-with-Prime, Android, and a few carrier discounts (e.g. free data for a year) and I'd happily dump my iPhone in a heartbeat.
Huh? The Yotaphone already runs Android, and not an Amazon-crippled version at that. :)
The article seems to be making the point that this is an indicator of something wrong at Amazon but I am extremely skeptical of that. I think they just try stuff and see what works.
I'd be more inclined to ask: Are they winning at enough things? If no, then are they doing enough things?
One of my favorite quotes that I gathered last year is from Jeff: "Risk is a necessary component of progress"
Android could have been the Fire Phone of its day. The earliest Android phones were just amazingly bad compared to the iPhone. But iPhones were only available on AT&T. Do you live in an area where AT&T had no service? Your only choice was an Android. iPhones insisted for years on having exactly one clearly unpopular screen size. Want a 4" screen? Your only choice was an Android. Apple refused to develop a downmarket phone. Want something less than a flagship? Your only choice was an Android.
That window has closed. iOS has finally filled in all the places it used to suck (well, maybe except for developing an economical model, but last year's phone looks better now than it used to, and in any case Android filled that niche to the overflowing).
Without Android, the iPhone would suck. We finally have the competition everyone wished for in the Windows 98 days.
If Apple hadn't waited until carriers (especially Verizon) to come to them, iPhones would be as full of branding and bloatware as any other carrier-sold phone, not to mention interference with updates, interference with retail launches and who knows what else. Limiting the range of phones they offer means they miss niches, but also helps control costs (allowing them to use premium components more affordably), simplifies the buying process for customers, supports a broader and deeper accessory ecosystem and so on. Not jumping on many new technologies (e.g. LTE), creates an opening for competitors, but also lets Apple avoid the associated growing pains so they can provide a more consistent user experience.
If Apple had followed the path you advocate, they'd have picked up many of the disadvantages of the Android ecosystem, without the corresponding advantages (most notably rapid improvements via intra-ecosystem competition). That seems obviously worse than the path they actually chose.
I used to think they'd missed an opportunity by not dominating the lower end of the market too like they did with the ipod but I think a big issue would be having the apps and software run on their phones. They are after all a software platform and if you produce cheap crap phones then the whole business of just being able to download an app and run it on your Apple phone breaks as the cheap phones may not be up to it. You'd then end up with different software and marketing efforts for the different phones and before you knew it you'd be Nokia.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/04/apple-continues-to...
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.
Increased shopping through mobile? Make your android/ios products better?
It just never made any sense, but I guess many successful products don't make initial sense either.
I'm deathly afraid to get one for the same reason.
Frictionless purchases and vertical channel integration makes perfect sense to me.
My experience is anecdotal, but it might be worthwhile to ask your acquaintances why they buy so many ebooks after buying a Kindle.
You can't buy a book or rent an instant movie on an iPhone. It is a big weak spot.
I can even watch the movie in the Amazon Instant Video app, but I'm not sure I could stand a whole movie on such a tiny screen.
Imagine if Microsoft would only allow software on windows that it approved and got 30% ransom.
I think the article discussed this mainly in the context of Kindle. It's only digital in app purchases that need to go through Apple's payment processing.
The Kindle is apparently doing well and makes perfect sense.
And 2 of my new favorite gadgets are Fire TV (vocal search is the way to go) and Echo (very well done an a no-brainer at $99).
ps I got my Fire phone for $199 no-contract with free year of Prime ($99 net unlocked).
I'm pretty sure they're right.
Or, put another way: chill.
Where can I get one for 99c, in UK on ebay [new] they're about £200 (~$300) on O2 network or £250 unlocked. Lowest monthly for a contract is £28.
"Have you seen my phone, it was free." [ie £45 a month for 2 years]
US cellular providers have very opaque pricing so it's hard to tell how much those installments really are. But usually when you have the option to buy a phone with or without a contract, the spread's $400-$500. That strongly implies the real price is about $401-$501, amortized over 24 months.
Long story short, using the perverse mathematics of United States mobile phone pricing, the £200 you're finding is about 3/4 of the $0.99 the article says Americans are paying.
>"Originally priced at $199 (with contract) and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory."* //
So they are comparing '99c' to '$199 (with contract)'.
Meh, I should know better than to expect realistic reporting.
[to avoid any doubt I'm not disagreeing with you in any way]
In the UK a phone might be free on a £45/month contract, £100 on a £30/month contract and so on. Does that not appen in the US?
But the usual method for the last decade was that you paid for a 24 month contract, and pay a lump up front that paid for the differentiation of the low-end phones (free, or 99c, or $50) from the high end phones ($100 - $300). The rest of the price was invisibly wrapped into the contract -- and there would likely be a hefty early termination fee if you wanted to walk away from the contract.
Recently, phone companies have been trying to extract even more money by offering a non-contract service contract (cancel any time, no fee) along with a rent-to-own plan on the phone (pay a chunk up front, then after 24 payments it's yours.) For some reason this does not result in a discount for the service plan...
This also makes me wonder if they are rolling out the Echo the way they are because of Fire Phone. Invitation only and a (presumably) demand-driven supply chain.
Kindle, echo, etc. were decent in their first iteration and provided some value.
Please pardon my ignorance on Accounting. I don't have basic Accounting 101 knowledge, but please help me understand this. If I, as an individual, loose certain amount of money, it is most likely from my savings. Otherwise, it must be on my credit card, which means, I lost the bank's money. Eventually, I need to repay.
How can a company that hasn't made much profit over the years, loose $437 million? If it hasn't made profit, it has no savings. Clearly 'someone' is giving Amazon credit. I assume its the investors. But in what form does Amazon borrow money? Does Amazon issue bonds and raise money? Does it issue more shares/stock? In short, how is Amazon getting so much money and loosing it in each quarter.
Any links to read will also be helpful.
http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/cash_on_hand
(found by googling for "amazon cash on hand")
There is a market for a really solid Android phone for say $150 off contract. Amazon could have partnered with any number of prepaid providers and also normal providers to have "the best deal in wireless".
They built a whole market around driving down prices and reaching a mass audience, then they compete with top end phones. If the Kindle Fire was $500, it would have flopped. The $600 Fire Phone DID flop.
It feels like Kindle tech's value proposition is quality technology at an unbeatable price. The Fire Phone didn't hit that at all.
But yes, everyone expected and wanted a Moto G type phone.
People also fall out of love, as they have done at one point or another with many of the examples mentioned here. Be essential, that' s much better.
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.
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.
That said, it's an awful phone. The OS feels clunky and old. The 3D stuff is, as mentioned in the article, gimmicky and pointless. Firefly is just annoying (it seemingly pops up at random, as if to say, "Hey, wanna buy something? You should totally buy something."). The interface, where it has diverged from Android, is confusing as hell. Menus pop up when you rock the phone, or shake it, or something, I dunno. It just randomly pops stuff up sometimes and I don't know why or how to replicate it. The status bar is disabled by default and the launch screen is more limited and frustrating than the original launch screen on the G1 (the first Android devices). Camera comes up every time I try to adjust the volume because the buttons are right next to each other. This also seems to be a trigger for Firefly...maybe. I honestly don't know how Firefly is called into existence, but it's popped up dozens of times since I've owned the phone, none of which were times I wanted it.
Amazon built the phone Amazon wanted. It's not a phone designed around customer needs/wants, at all. They even pulled out a bunch of functionality for seemingly no reason other than they want people to buy more things from Amazon. For example, you can't use your music on the device as a ring tone or alarm (a feature that has existed in Android approximately forever). But, Amazon will sell you ring tones.
It is possible to sideload the Google Play Store, which is one redeeming characteristic of the phone...so, I have GMail, Firefox browser (which is not in the Amazon store, but can also be sideloaded), calendar, docs, etc. But, it's still not a pleasant phone experience. The UI is needlessly opaque, and the unique features of the phone are pointless or annoying. The unique features are also not at all discoverable. I didn't know Firefly could recognize music and art, that's kinda neat. I don't know how to use any of the buttons and movements to make the phone do things. They seem nearly random when I try to use those features, which is quite frustrating.
I gave it, I think a 3 star review, at Amazon, on the strength of the hardware, the very low price, and the fact that Google Play Store can be sideloaded relatively easily. But, I would never recommend it for someone who isn't a tinkerer. It's just too confusing, and the native apps (for email, maps, etc.) are weak.
Edit: And perhaps the most frustrating thing is that there is no back button. You have to do a swipe gesture from the bottom (the very bottom, or it scrolls instead) of the display. I sometimes find myself having to attempt this a half dozen times to make it work. It is incredibly frustrating; and worse, I find myself doing it on my Nexus 7 (which has a back button and doesn't respond to this gesture). It's training me to be their kinda stupid.
The UI is minimalist, and non-configurable, to the point of feeling like a feature phone.
I didn't need to root it to get the Google Play Store side loaded, so I haven't looked into that, either. That said, if I can't figure out how to replace the awful launcher/home screen on this thing, I may eventually give it over the to CM gods (or whatever custom ROM comes along). I would like my back button, as well.
Edit: this conversation led to me googling how to replace the annoying launcher...it was as easy as installing Google Now Launcher. I just reduced my dislike of my phone by another large measure. Now, if I can just get the back button to come back, the stupid tilt functions disabled, and google maps to work right, this might turn out to be a decent phone.
They thought they could execute perfectly on designing and shipping phones. I believe they can. The problem is the market for phones doesn't care about flawless execution. Legendarily the existing network providers suck and the existing phones aren't too great either but people love them anyway and never make their buying decisions based on who's most likely to ship on time or least likely to crash.
They would fail exactly the same way if they tried to sell fast food or American cars or car insurance, where nobody cares about quality and only want low price. They would be a huge success in something like medical supply logistics (don't they already sell stuff like that?) or aerospace (spaceX better look out)
The challenge for them is trying to sell perfect logistics, perfect performance, perfect execution in general to markets where people currently really don't care. I think they are running out of consumer markets that they don't already dominate where people care about flawless execution.
Its interesting that all the stuff I use with my phone comes from Amazon. Case, bluetooth ear piece, BT headphones, charger, cable... I'd even buy a phone from them, although I'd buy the phone I want, not a fire.
Also note they're good at shipping a variety but not good at making anything. I never want Amazon's XYZ, ever. I want an XYZ, and Amazon is the best in the business at getting a XYZ delivered to me.
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.
see below
- 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 separate sets of pull-ups on a single i2c bus)
- some parts choices were motivated by personal interests of people in the hw team, even against their own data & analyses. This was allowed to proceed
- some of the management made the team look very foolish in front of vendors (asking questions that made no sense in the current millennium)
- 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.
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!
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...
I guess those managers had never read the Mythical Man Month?
While I appreciate your perspective, during the course of reporting, you have to understand that you're going to hear an endless amount of varying perspectives, especially when it comes to emotional finger-pointing and Monday morning quarterbacking. It sounds like you worked on the project for about a year, of a product with roots that can be traced as far back as 2009. It's also not clear to me what "team" you're referring to, since so many teams were involved over this long time period, not just in Seattle but in Cupertino/Sunnyvale/Cambridge/etc, as you know. So I just hope people can keep that in mind when reading about "inaccuracies," which, on the whole, I certainly would disagree with.
As for your complaints, it sounds like many of them are aimed at the hardware teams; during my reporting, I certainly heard just as many complaints leveled at the software teams (e.g. at former VP Howard Look before his departure).
I totally understand that current/former employees get defensive about these kinds of topics, especially when it comes to their work being under the eye of criticism (early Dynamic Perspective team members were especially defensive during my reporting). But it's important to separate fact from emotion, and present a narrative that is clear, accurate, and balanced.
At this point, I've talked to nearly four-dozen sources for this story -- current and former employees at all levels of the company -- and this is the story that's emerged. The feedback I've since received privately from insiders has been incredibly reassuring.
With that said, I'm not dismissing your comments. But if you'd like to provide more insight, feel free to reach out. I'm accessible online, and happy to connect on background, if that's most comfortable for you.
Best, Austin
Amazon is attempting to do this. They have been successful in many different ways, but for every winner they create they need to create multiple losers. The fire phone seems to be one of these losers, but time will tell.
I really admire Amazon's tolerance for failure. Most large companies would never take such risks.
Amazon is more like a VC fund or an incubator than one individual startup. What's the 2014 revenue of all YC companies combined? That would be a good number to compare Amazons revenue to.
[1] http://www.macstories.net/stories/a-discussion-about-apples-...
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
>You receive 70% of the payment
>developers earn 70 percentIn 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
I admire Amazon a lot, but this one was a misfire.
Really? Anyone can back this up? I would have thought the opposite. I didn't buy the 3G Kindle because it was more exepensive, all I cared was the eink display.
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.
I think the whole point of that feature was to capture the airport book market--people facing a four hour flight have a million books to choose from instead of fifty rubbishy paperbacks.
The show-stopper issue for me is the UI. It feels as if screen elements are sloshing, or hard to find, and the UI is hard to use when I'm in motion.
I expect the UI will be easy for Amazon to solve. The phone is a version 1 and a strong debut -- even if it didn't sell well.
I'm not sure one follows from the other... how exactly did the Fire make a "strong debut"?
The last I heard, they basically downloaded the android OS, and re-wrote all of the system UI framework components. Of course, this meant that most android apps broke because they failed to make all of the options functional, so they spent somewhere around twice the time fixing issues as they did writing them.
Amazon doesn't have to invest anything into phones that might not get sold, just "raw materials" that get assembled into phones on demand in their fullfillment centers.
Any unassmbled processors, screens, cameras, etc. just get sold back onto the market if the phone doesn't gain success.
That is and has been done. Like for the Moto X, which is custom assembled if you do a custom order.
However, there is a substantial ongoing cost to keep a manufacturing line up and running for a product. If you're not currently running phones (or whatever product) every day, then you'd want to use the line space for other products. This implies setup / teardown costs and (re)training.
In general, the manufacturer would prefer to start running the product at some given volume per day, be given plenty of notice to scale up or down the volume, and then cease production and be done with it. That minimizes their costs.
But will all of Bezos’s risk-taking ultimately pay off?
"They make no money!" former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
exclaimed in a recent TV interview. "In my world,
[that’s] not a real business. I get it if you don’t make
money for two or three years, but Amazon is, what, 21
years old?"
I think he should shut down everything and focus on AWS and Amazon.com only.