> Still in the works is a high-end computer for the kitchen—code-named Kabinet—designed to serve as a hub for an Internet-connected home and capable of taking voice commands for tasks like ordering merchandise from Amazon.com.
It's amazing that Amazon thinks a useful feature is "ability to purchase stuff from Amazon faster". I don't make my decisions about products based on 1 touch ordering of supplies. If it solves a problem I have, great, but I certainly don't have an "Amazon ordering problem".
You have to understand that the company makes most of its money by selling stuff. One of the easiest ways to get your project approved there is to say "we'll increase sales by xx million." If you just tell the executives that you want to make a speaker voice thing or reorder button thing that customers will probably want a whole lot you won't get approval.
The marketing is reminiscent of Amazon's fantasy delivery drone.
"the user interface required the user to complete a two-week course just to learn how to program the device, using only toggle-switch input and binary light output ... Although a fantasy gift, the Kitchen Computer represented the first time a computer was offered as a consumer product."
They have one of those at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'm not sure if it's one of the most awesome things I've ever seen or one of the stupidest, but either way, no Wikipedia article can do it justice.
Everybody who lives in the area (or who works for Amazon) should spend an afternoon going through that museum. It's full of thought-provoking artifacts like that.
TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
Indeed. I remember there was an article that said it wasn't even necessarily product management as it was Bezos who more or less governed the product design.
In any case, I find it a bit bizarre that they would just fire them when AWS is hiring so heavily. You would think they would just shuffle them to other parts of the org. While I was there we would get new people from other parts of Amazon that were downsizing all the time like Silk.
When I interviewed at Amazon it was mostly the team I was joining doing the interview. It may be that they do not have a uniform hiring bar across all their organizations, which makes shuffling people around a lot harder.
I've been on a couple of projects that were complete flops, devs are always first to go. Meanwhile the idiots who actually wasted all the money and bloated the feature set start working on version "2.0".
From my - perhaps "limited" as it's only been to a few years - experience they aren't _all_ let go. With the rest, its easier to start fresh with lower paid devs than give raises to the older engineers who will begin to request being paid appropriately for their time and commitment.
There were good devs at Nike? When I lived in Portland Nike had a reputation for hiring...ah...those with a bit yet to go on the learning curve, shall we say.
Theres a difference between making mobile Apps and making a mobile OS. Keeping people with those skills on to work on the Amazon Android app feels to me like hiring Linus Torvalds because you want to release a Linux version of your software.
And if you believe that this is what protects managers from getting fired, you don't have enough experience.
Managers have all sorts of ridiculous beliefs, but the root cause of management incompetence is this: that managers believe that a manager can manage anything. Running a store, developing a phone, building a house, designing a rocket to go to the moon, it's all the same thing according to them. Getting info, negotiate, motivate a team, giving speeches, running projects, ... Some go further in this, and some hold up the idea that something like "management science" exists.
This directly leads to the second ridiculous belief, which causes a feedback loop : that they can hire other managers anywhere, absolutely no concern for what they did before, as long as they had slightly less "reports" (so they are "promoted" into their new position), for any management function.
Then, of course the second belief leads to negotiation, to trading business efforts for jobs. If you make my department look good (internally "hire" us as consultants because your financial performance is down the crapper anyway and we'll hire you next quarter after your division gets nixed). Nothing is so damaging to companies, as the main thing being traded is making disasters far worse in trade for personal exits, but the people who'd have to do something about it are of course managers, who have negotiated for jobs and have further negotiation in place for moving up.
For "some reason" managers never ever start any company. Companies are started by people who actually know what the company is supposed to do. Companies are (were) started by mechanics, by engineers, by traders (ie. shop attendants), by software developers, sometimes by experienced investors, by ... The best companies were started by people who had the skills to do well in 2 different fields. Generally what happens is that at some point a deep and explosive conflict happens between these founders and some employees of their companies, and then someone is brought in to prevent this. In reality, this is normal. Meet enough people, raise the stakes high enough and you will clash very seriously with other people. And the bigger your company gets as a founder, the more is at stake, and the more people you will have to deal with. So a conflict escalating is a matter of time, but it is human nature to compensate : founders will bring in a manager to deal with this sort of thing, and then the job trading begins. As everybody who's held a job at a large company knows, this does not prevent personality clashes, quite the opposite, but once this position trading starts, it is incredibly hard to stop.
If they are getting out of phone, they don't need the phone engineers anymore, at least. They would be hard to re-purpose to other projects, even hardware ones (like IoT).
Parent comment didn't say anti-user, but the dedicated hardware button for identifying and purchasing goods from Amazon is pretty ridiculous. It's like an Amazon Dash button in your pocket all the time. It's hard to argue they weren't thinking Amazon-first on that one.
"But there were some serious problems with it like forced promotions where users would would prefer instead functionality, useless gimmicks, and other silliness. Without fail everytime I pointed one out, the Lead looked down a bit bashfully and admitted Bezos had insisted on this nonsense."
From that angle, it's the difference between a true product maker and a retailer. They have different visions, one is more user-centered and another is more oneself-organization-value-chain-centered. Unfortunately, most of people with huge capital leverage capability are not true product makers and most of true product makers do not have that capability. Jobs happened to be the one that had both. I wish he had lived till 100. Apple without Jobs seems to come out with new products by levering existing products' values or somewhat network effect in products and OS eco, not the other way around.
Interesting article (thanks). My takeaway is that Amazon executes well on delivering low margin goods, but the phone attempted to create a high margin brand.
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about that article. It feels like it's trying too hard to drive an agenda, instead of presenting facts and letting the reader decide.
I have no idea about the actual situation, but this article doesn't leave me feeling enlightened.
I wonder if the outcome would've been any different if they had not forked the n-1 version of Android and instead shipped something like a Moto G3 with stock Google stuff combined with Amazon customizations. With a cheap price, great customer service and timely updates it would've made a dent sooner or later.
After all who wants a phone without GMail, Chrome and GMaps? Amazon didn't do anything to compensate the lack - except for may be the Silk Browser which to me wasn't anything spectacularly good compared to Mobile Chrome.
Honestly I'd take a cheap phone with no Amazon customizations. I don't think you can ship an Android phone with Google Apps and not with the Play Store though, and I can't imagine Amazon would want that since they have their own Market to promote.
On the other hand, it wasn't like the phone was originally cheap; if anything it was priced like a high end phone. That being the case, perhaps they got too greedy.
When I was at Amazon I asked someone in upper management why they priced the phone so high, telling them nobody would buy it at that price. They said the reason was so that people would think it's high end, and not dismiss it as a low/mid range phone. In the end, I think nobody bought that it was high end.
To be honest it amazes me that people at Amazon drink the koolaid when it does so little as a company to promote company pride, compared with the other tech giant in the area, Microsoft.
It is a great deal of disconnect. You can't just make a veblen good by slapping an outrageous pricetag on shit. It has to at least pretend to be a quality product.
If the world worked like that, then you could open a hotdog shop, sell hotdogs for 100USD each, then expect a Michelin star rating.
Truly going big would have been to build two phones- keep the Fire as high end, then build a cheaper version for the low/mid range. That way there is no ambiguity.
The thing is, I think Amazon is fine with selling at low margins. Look at their Kindle devices.
If anything they don't need to make money from device sales if the phones come preinstalled with the Amazon market as they can make money off app sales and get more developer mindshare.
I flew up in First Class on Virgin to Seattle next to a key lead on the fire phone. We had a nice long talk about the project and what happened. He vehemently defended the Fire Phone and touted its great and unique aspects while I examined it and admired the hard work he put in. 3D modeling, gyroscopic-driven interactions, an universal activity feed -- some interesting stuff was there...
But there were some serious problems with it like forced promotions where users would would prefer instead functionality, useless gimmicks, and other silliness. Without fail everytime I pointed one out, the Lead looked down a bit bashfully and admitted Bezos had insisted on this nonsense.
Bezos is an blind, egotistical CEO, forcing hardworking engineers to take the fall for his naive and frankly stupid decisions. His instincts in hardware and product without fail have been downright pathetic -- and now he will to blame those who work tirelessly under him for his own failure.
That's life. Companies make bets, hire people to execute, and when things don't work out, plans change and staffing sometimes need to adjust. No reason to bash Bezos for taking gambles. They certainly didn't risk the company.
The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already?
The same is true for Google. So much lip service about moonshots and long term thinking and the new CFO comes in and talks about cost discipline and potentially capital return. Turns out dual class shares don't make you anymore 'long-term focused' than the next company.
The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already?
Because they are investing their cash in the business, not just spending it. Investing means knowing when an investment is doing poorly and not throwing good money after bad.
Are you telling me that Amazon has written off the smartphone business, one of the most quickly adopted pieces of technology since the original PC and which has made Apple one of the most profitable businesses in the world, as an idea not worth pursuing anymore?
That's certainly possible. Is that so hard to believe?
The Kindle worked out, the Fire phone didnt. Maybe its just the phone models since they're still working on other devices. They also just became more valuable than Walmart. It seems like they know what they're doing, including cutting losses.
The Kindle worked out only after iteration. It was the same for Apple with the iPod and iPhone as well. Amazon has quit in the first inning because their phone wasn't an overnight success. If they were truly focused on the long-term they wouldn't be afraid to continue to invest in it.
Kindle worked out right out of the gate. They dramatically underestimated the demand for the first Kindle.
Certainly that first iteration looks like shit compared to modern iterations, but why would you expect otherwise?
Arguably Bezos' unlikely success with Kindle made people give him the benefit of the doubt when they should not have. That was my take away anyway, from when I was working on Fire Phone (I left my team because of that project, and my experiences with it greatly contributed to my decision to leave the company).
Even if everything you say up to the last clause is perfectly true, it doesn't follow that he blames them for the failure. He simply and objectively doesn't need them if the product they were skilled to do is a flop and has no future.
It's an interesting example of how objectification and anthropormorphism can be the inverse of each other.
We treat the business like a human, assuming it 'blames' people. The business treats humans like objects, throwing them in the garbage when they are no longer of use.
Laying someone off is not throwing them in the garbage. It's saying, "We don't have work for you here now." It's painful, and it can be damaging to self-esteem, but at worst, it's throwing them in the recycling...
Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company treats employees is far from ideal, but he definitely is not a blind pathetic CEO.
It just so happened that Jobs's companies were mostly highly (sometimes obscenely) profitable, while Amazon stays very near profitless for last ~20 years, having to re-invest all its proceedings.
In the end, this comes down to a question of ends justifying the means.
I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that the company has done very well in many ways. So has Apple. We've learned that both Jobs and Bezos weren't/aren't very good people to work for.
Maybe it's naive of me to think this way, but I'd like to think that companies can be wildly successful without being life sucking and horrible in the process.
No first hand experience, but I've heard/read this many times that Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc aren't good people to work for. Are there any bosses of mega corporations that are good to work for?
What sometimes tends to happen is that people who are extremely skilled in one area can fool themselves into thinking that they are also skilled in some other area. Whether that's actually true or not is kind of random, but frequently enough they're just fooling themselves. It's a kind of inspired overconfidence, and not listening to doubters is a way to achieve that.
The actual skills and intuitions they have may simply not have carried over, and it is their fault if they managed to fool themselves like that.
Perhaps it would be wise to remove his specific job working on the Fire phone? Wouldn't want him to get in trouble at work for comments like that, even if it was ill advised to say them to a stranger on a flight.
I think it really did have some really smart features -- the instant free on-phone tech support is brilliant -- but it was poorly marketed. I think it could have worked if they pitched it to first-time smartphone owners rather than tacking on a bunch of random things to attract the early adopter crowd.
Counterpoint: if you don't fail once in a while, it's probably not because you're awesome and infallible, but because you're not trying to do anything challenging and/or interesting.
That applies to everybody on the totem pole, from interns to CEOs.
The problem with the Fire Phone isn't the hardware, the hardware is great, the problem is Fire OS. No one wants a half baked Android fork and a walled garden. My wife purchased the Fire Phone during their last promotion, and within 15 minutes she was reflashing to CyanogenMod.
The phone would have been successful if they had simply run stock Android, preloaded their own bloatware like Samsung does, and perhaps a dedicated button for Firefly, which is a pretty neat app. The reason the Fire Phone failed was Bezos is an egotistical asshole who doesn't care what the customer wants.
I'm not sure what walled garden you're talking about. You can install apps and app stores from whatever source you want, just like stock Android. You can't install Google Play, but that's because Google has restricted it, not Amazon. It seems like some kind of doublespeak to call something a walled garden when someone else built a wall around their app to keep you from planting it there.
I thought the amazon phone was super cool technologically but I have no need for a phone designed to sell me amazon retail services and products. It'd be like buying a WalMart brand phone, doesn't make much sense as i want freedom, not vendor lock in.
Is this true for all products or just phone and tablets? I was actually intrigued by the echo and dash, even if I think they should be open and not tied to one company or use.
My Amazon Fire TV Stick is quite nice: fairly snappy, very usable interface, downloadable apps, almost-perfect minimalist remote control. (One flaw: the 'home' button is too easy to hit by mistake.) Better in most respects than the Google ChromeCast.
I hope Fire TV products survive and thrive through this reorg.
Mine was pre-ordered, so it's from an early batch. By any chance are you using an alternate to the bundled AC-USB adapter? (Maybe it's a voltage issue.)
Great... if they stop making consumer devices maybe this stupid fork of Android can go away and they can offer their Amazon Video on ChromeCast and Nexus Player
Is Kindle one of the "consumer devices" that's being curtailed? I thought it was doing well, but if I was thinking of buying one, I'd think twice after reading this article.
I don't get it why would they fire the team? Can they not be absorbed into other groups? Such a growing company like Amazon definitely needs more people right?
Should have just made an Amazon-optimized Android phone. Amazon's version of Android is terrible. Some of the gestures were cute but I think maybe a bit ambitious. I think there might have been a market for something a bit more normal.
It's not that the Kindle was bad. It's that the e-reader market sector was absorbed by device integration into more general devices, phones and tablets.
The killer was the growth of "fat phones", which moved into the Kindle's screen size range.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadIt still comes with a year of Prime membership, so if you're a Prime customer anyway, it's essentially a $31 contract-free phone.
I wonder if it's an aggressive attempt to acquire some users, or if they've given up on the product and they're just getting rid of inventory?
> We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.
Unfortunately they're out for now
Will this be a competitor to the Google router?
It's Honeywell all over again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer
"the user interface required the user to complete a two-week course just to learn how to program the device, using only toggle-switch input and binary light output ... Although a fantasy gift, the Kitchen Computer represented the first time a computer was offered as a consumer product."
Everybody who lives in the area (or who works for Amazon) should spend an afternoon going through that museum. It's full of thought-provoking artifacts like that.
TBH it sucks that the developers are the first ones to go , when it generally isnt their fault... it's bad product management/sales/strategy that caused the device to fail...
In any case, I find it a bit bizarre that they would just fire them when AWS is hiring so heavily. You would think they would just shuffle them to other parts of the org. While I was there we would get new people from other parts of Amazon that were downsizing all the time like Silk.
(Maybe not impossible, but harder)
I've been on a couple of projects that were complete flops, devs are always first to go. Meanwhile the idiots who actually wasted all the money and bloated the feature set start working on version "2.0".
He who holds the purse string holds the power.
The people that built the flop get to look for a new job building someone else's future flops.
I'm waiting for the surge of native developers fleeing from the food delivery gold rush startups before starting on our native app.
If you are a designer, you can go work on another project.
If you are a BA, you can go work on another project.
If you are a manager, you can go work on another project.
If you are an mobile developer/hardware engineer, and they aren't building any more OS/hardware, they can't move you onto another project.
If anything, these layoffs seem to correllate with some of the commentary in the recent NYT article about Amazon.
Managers have all sorts of ridiculous beliefs, but the root cause of management incompetence is this: that managers believe that a manager can manage anything. Running a store, developing a phone, building a house, designing a rocket to go to the moon, it's all the same thing according to them. Getting info, negotiate, motivate a team, giving speeches, running projects, ... Some go further in this, and some hold up the idea that something like "management science" exists.
This directly leads to the second ridiculous belief, which causes a feedback loop : that they can hire other managers anywhere, absolutely no concern for what they did before, as long as they had slightly less "reports" (so they are "promoted" into their new position), for any management function.
Then, of course the second belief leads to negotiation, to trading business efforts for jobs. If you make my department look good (internally "hire" us as consultants because your financial performance is down the crapper anyway and we'll hire you next quarter after your division gets nixed). Nothing is so damaging to companies, as the main thing being traded is making disasters far worse in trade for personal exits, but the people who'd have to do something about it are of course managers, who have negotiated for jobs and have further negotiation in place for moving up.
For "some reason" managers never ever start any company. Companies are started by people who actually know what the company is supposed to do. Companies are (were) started by mechanics, by engineers, by traders (ie. shop attendants), by software developers, sometimes by experienced investors, by ... The best companies were started by people who had the skills to do well in 2 different fields. Generally what happens is that at some point a deep and explosive conflict happens between these founders and some employees of their companies, and then someone is brought in to prevent this. In reality, this is normal. Meet enough people, raise the stakes high enough and you will clash very seriously with other people. And the bigger your company gets as a founder, the more is at stake, and the more people you will have to deal with. So a conflict escalating is a matter of time, but it is human nature to compensate : founders will bring in a manager to deal with this sort of thing, and then the job trading begins. As everybody who's held a job at a large company knows, this does not prevent personality clashes, quite the opposite, but once this position trading starts, it is incredibly hard to stop.
That is rather the whole point of positions of power and influence.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3039887/under-fire
It worked. He was the customer.
Quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127205
bezos tried to go all in.
I have no idea about the actual situation, but this article doesn't leave me feeling enlightened.
After all who wants a phone without GMail, Chrome and GMaps? Amazon didn't do anything to compensate the lack - except for may be the Silk Browser which to me wasn't anything spectacularly good compared to Mobile Chrome.
On the other hand, it wasn't like the phone was originally cheap; if anything it was priced like a high end phone. That being the case, perhaps they got too greedy.
When I was at Amazon I asked someone in upper management why they priced the phone so high, telling them nobody would buy it at that price. They said the reason was so that people would think it's high end, and not dismiss it as a low/mid range phone. In the end, I think nobody bought that it was high end.
To be honest it amazes me that people at Amazon drink the koolaid when it does so little as a company to promote company pride, compared with the other tech giant in the area, Microsoft.
Wow, that is whole another level of disconnect with reality!
If the world worked like that, then you could open a hotdog shop, sell hotdogs for 100USD each, then expect a Michelin star rating.
They had to go big or go home. They really should have gone home though.
If anything they don't need to make money from device sales if the phones come preinstalled with the Amazon market as they can make money off app sales and get more developer mindshare.
But there were some serious problems with it like forced promotions where users would would prefer instead functionality, useless gimmicks, and other silliness. Without fail everytime I pointed one out, the Lead looked down a bit bashfully and admitted Bezos had insisted on this nonsense.
Bezos is an blind, egotistical CEO, forcing hardworking engineers to take the fall for his naive and frankly stupid decisions. His instincts in hardware and product without fail have been downright pathetic -- and now he will to blame those who work tirelessly under him for his own failure.
The same is true for Google. So much lip service about moonshots and long term thinking and the new CFO comes in and talks about cost discipline and potentially capital return. Turns out dual class shares don't make you anymore 'long-term focused' than the next company.
Because they are investing their cash in the business, not just spending it. Investing means knowing when an investment is doing poorly and not throwing good money after bad.
The Kindle worked out, the Fire phone didnt. Maybe its just the phone models since they're still working on other devices. They also just became more valuable than Walmart. It seems like they know what they're doing, including cutting losses.
Certainly that first iteration looks like shit compared to modern iterations, but why would you expect otherwise?
Arguably Bezos' unlikely success with Kindle made people give him the benefit of the doubt when they should not have. That was my take away anyway, from when I was working on Fire Phone (I left my team because of that project, and my experiences with it greatly contributed to my decision to leave the company).
The game is over. Apple won the money and Android/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi won the market-share.
Companies that refuse to indulge in "me, too" behavior in the smartphone era are probably making the right call.
We treat the business like a human, assuming it 'blames' people. The business treats humans like objects, throwing them in the garbage when they are no longer of use.
I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that the company has done very well in many ways. So has Apple. We've learned that both Jobs and Bezos weren't/aren't very good people to work for.
Maybe it's naive of me to think this way, but I'd like to think that companies can be wildly successful without being life sucking and horrible in the process.
From personal experience The Kindle Fire is a dreadful device.
In the off chance that he wasn't one of the engineers who took the fall.
That applies to everybody on the totem pole, from interns to CEOs.
The phone would have been successful if they had simply run stock Android, preloaded their own bloatware like Samsung does, and perhaps a dedicated button for Firefly, which is a pretty neat app. The reason the Fire Phone failed was Bezos is an egotistical asshole who doesn't care what the customer wants.
Once again, betting on 3d leads to a loss.
My wife actually liked the gimmicky 3D. Go figure.
I hope Fire TV products survive and thrive through this reorg.
The killer was the growth of "fat phones", which moved into the Kindle's screen size range.
Oh, right, they also made a phone.