Honestly this is no surprise. I am a big Amazon fan, but if you are selling a restricted platform item you have to sell it at a loss. I do not know what they were thinking. It was priced higher than comparable flagship phones while being somewhat locked down.
Yep. Lack of Google Apps was a complete deal killer for me, even withstanding the price. I felt the same way when I tested out a Kindle Fire tablet (opted for a Nexus 7). You'd have to pry my Kindle reader out of my cold dead hands though.
And specifically that the Fire tablet seems to be most successful among kids. The parental controls on Kindle Fire are pretty good, but the locked-down app store (No YouTube!) was only tolerable because the parent is choosing the apps.
Lack of Google Apps was a big problem 2 years ago. These days, lack of Play Services means a huge number of non-Google Android apps won't work. Play Services is Android for many developers.
Agreed. I had been impressed with Amazon's initial tries with the hardware space with kindle which really solved a customer need in an innovative way. In contrast the fire line of phones and tv seems to have really taken their eye off the ball. Customers don't want to pay a premium to buy another portal into purchasing things from Amazon.
FTA: "When it launched a few months ago, it was $199"
$199 with the essentially non-optional AT&T plan. $649 regular price, which they would let you buy it at even though the phone was locked to AT&T no matter how you bought it. Into a market where the Nexus 5 already existed at $350 (fully unlocked) and Motorola had even cheaper options for very functional full-Android phones.
Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem (and I say that as a happy and high volume customer of Amazon Prime/Instant/Kindle).
Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem
100% agreed -- they've even said that their stated goal with the Kindle Fire was to bring quality tech at affordable prices; why they thought they could get away with a subprime phone at a prime price is beyond me.
That must be why the iPhone is such a spectacular failure.
I don't think it has anything to do with the restrictiveness, just that it was not very compelling and had 2 weird gimmicks no one really had a use for. That combined with the low visibility of Amazon as a phone manufacturer, I can really understand people held off buying.
> That must be why the iPhone is such a spectacular failure.
The iPhone has a VERY LARGE ecosystem of software and hardware to support it. There is a lot of value there.
But the Fire Phone didn't have that. It ran a version of Android so they could have had a lot of stuff but instead they chose to prevent that. In the end it cost as much as their competitors but had no software and it's only unique features were somewhat gimmicky.
I can't fathom why Amazon could not find the expertise to see this one coming.
I mean, let's be real here, it's an extremely restricted platform that cuts you off from tons and I mean tons of great content on app stores we already have, content we're already familiar with.
And then it provides you with sub-par hardware at that price level and nothing more than gimmicks.
And one of the big reasons for all of this? To push a feature allowing people to point their phone at something and buy it on Amazon. Surprise, that's a software-based feature you could build for just about any phone.
The fire phone (and other failed experiments like the Kin or the various Facebook phones) all seem like they're identifying "locking the buyer into a single corporate ecosystem" as a feature, but consumers are treating it as a bug.
Maybe not a feature, but a selling point for sure, and I couldn't agree more. That said, they don't really advertise the "locked in" part, but it's unlikely that it takes long for the average user to figure it out.
The question "what does this phone do that others cannot" really was never answered with the Fire. (Other than that gimmicky perspective view thing)
I think you're right, but Apple does exactly that, so it's clearly possible to succeed that way. Whether it's possible for anyone but Apple to succeed that way is another question. I think it might be--say a Chinese company with Chinese customers, or a future Google-only ecosystem, or an Amazon that negotiates a huge range of discounted offerings (20% discount at Starbucks and thousands of other brick & mortar restaurants and shops as long as you buy with your Amazon phone through the Amazon retail network, etc.
With the iPhone Apple only had to be better than a smart phone, which they did. With Android Google had to be better than a smart phone, cheaper than an iPhone, or at least just as good and they basically did that.
Today if you launch something new you need to be able to compete with the value in the iOS and Android ecosystems to draw people and that's a VERY big hurdle. Microsoft is trying their hardest but can't get it done.
There is no surprise here. Amazon's software ability and follow through is best describe as "exists" and the third party ecosystem is tiny. I'd rather have any $200 Android phone (even a low quality one) than a free Fire Phone and I like Amazon.
"Here's a phone, it has no popular apps, and they'll probably never be available!" Yeah. Same thing that killed the Pre. Same thing that's killing Windows Mobile.
You're underestimating Amazon's software muscle, they have some very hard hitting teams. Plenty of PhDs, old-time Lispers, etc.
I have a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9' tablet, the hardware is top notch and there are plenty of apps. From what I know, if an Android app doesn't heavily rely on Google proprietary APIs, like Maps, it's trivial to put it on the Amazon store.
But yeah, the phone needed to be 2-3 times cheaper to sell well.
> You're underestimating Amazon's software muscle, they have some very hard hitting teams. Plenty of PhDs, old-time Lispers, etc.
Call me when they can figure out that $.99 == $.99 100% of the time. [Hint: At least once every few months, this isn't true for at least one of their back end services and I have to clean up after it. This is just one issue of many they have, including the fact their "primary key" for items (ASINs) can be duplicated across multiple products.]
I think many, many people overestimate Amazon's technical capability.
They are competent but they are not special.
Hell, they can take up to 8 days to ship something from a warehouse sometimes.
All Amazon needs is something great that Apple and Google can't offer. For example, if I had an Amazon phone that paid for itself each month with, say, discounts on shopping, gas, restaurants, etc., I'd get it without hesitation. It might be a second phone or phones for my kids. If enough people did so, the Amazon market would be big enough for app developers to target and easier to target (and test, and make money with) than the far more diverse Android market. The iPhone apps I care about would soon be available, and I could then save a bundle by going Amazon only.
I'm just saying that it's still too soon to say that nothing significantly better than iPhone and its apps, or cheaper than Android and its apps, will ever be possible from a third platform.
Kin utterly failed in execution, too late, too buggy and crippled (due to common Microsoft pathologies), the carrier plan was too expensive for the target market, which at one time was at least somewhat healthy (T-Mobile Sidekick). Like the Fire, "everyone" expected it to fail by the time it was launched.
Organizational expertise is systemic; surely many individuals knew, but the group proceeded under its collective intelligence, or lack thereof.
It takes systems—and individuals well versed in thinking in terms of them—to develop organizational intelligence that actually exceeds that of the individual. Building that type of organization is the hardest problem in business, but in my opinion, it is the only problem.
The problem is the one tackled by W. Edwards Deming in his Quality philosophy. He takes the same stance: the quality of a product, in any production, is a result of management and leadership, organizational psychology, effective processes, and dedication to a systems-focused approach.
Moral of the story: Quality (all-encompassing quality, including everything from simple operational effectiveness, to market fit and understanding) comes from systems thinking.
Surprise, that's a software-based feature you could build for just about any phone.
That's an interesting comment. Isn't "phone" a software based feature you could build for just about any computer? I wonder if a fully featured general purpose mobile computer and ubiquitous wifi could make smartphones a thing of the past...
Oh, to me it already is. When I think about naming conventions I actually think 'Personal Computer' fits best what we all still call smartphones. The smartphone is the ultimate PC, in my opinion.
Sure it's limited in some of its tasks due to the display size and the efficiency of user input for things like text editing (e.g. writing a marketing plan, programming) etc.
The fact that it's also a phone I think is the least defining feature nowadays. I personally for example would rather do away with my ability to make and receive calls, than my ability to use internet (excluding Voip) for all the other applications on my phone. If you then consider that telephony is shifting towards being an internet-based service, and as you say the phone is just a software based feature, then yes I think we're getting to a place where calling these things 'smartphones' is as silly as continuing to call a computer/laptop a 'smart calculator' or 'smart typewriter' after 1990 or whatever.
This seems like the only logical reason any sane person at Amazon thought this phone would be a good idea. It's such an obvious dud in this stage. These people aren't stupid, yet there is no way this product would ever be successful. It would be fascinating to learn just what they are thinking.
i agree that failure is an important data point, but i don't understand why that means amazon would want to build the fire phone. their reasoning couldn't have been "well this seems like a good idea, and if it fails, at least we'll have a data point!" I am curious what caused them to think the fire phone was a good idea.
> The Fire phone’s product page at Amazon lists over 3,000 user reviews, mostly negative—the average rating is two out of five stars.
This highlights Amazons commitment to their customers. This is why Amazon will be #1 in the customer loyalty game in the long run. NO other company would keep this many bad reviews on their OWN product page.
V2.0 will be sooo much stronger because of this. Tough lesson to learn but invaluable internal motivation & feedback for the team.
V2.0 is what I was thinking as well. Many amazon products have terrible version 1.0s (kindle fire tablet anyone?), but improve markedly in the future. Fire phone is terrible now, but I'm not going to let that convince me that it will still be terrible 3-5 years from now.
I still find it astounding that high-ranking execs at Amazon could have thought that this product had even the slightest chance of being successful.
If the Kindle Fire tablets had all cost the same price as an iPad, I seriously doubt they would be enjoying the popularity that they have today. It would appear that the thought process leading to the existence of that Fire Phone was that the Kindle Fire's success has less to do with price and more to do with Amazon.com ecosystem integration!
As innovative as Amazon are in the online commerce space, I think everyone called this from the start as a massive failure. You would think with the trove of information that Amazon have as well as the incredibly smart data scientists they employ they could have analysed their treasure trove of info to see that a phone with restricted access to applications, sub-par hardware and overpriced retail cost would not sell very well. Heck, even without analysing any data, you would have the answer. What makes this situation even weirder is Jeff Bezos is a notorious data-driven decision maker. He is a numbers guy, he does not usually make decisions based on impulse or the need to compete, so I do not know how things got to this point.
Does this mean that Amazon are out of the smartphone business because of one failure? Not necessarily. Amazon have the money, the power and means to release something spectacular, but they will need to learn from their mistakes as well as their competitors and go back to the drawing board. I honestly would not be surprised if they already have a new phone in the works already.
One area Amazon could beat their competitors on is price Even though you can already buy a whole bunch of affordable Android phones, they usually come with horrible hardware and are made of the cheapest materials possible. If they can release a phone with a decent camera, proper unrestricted Android OS, plenty of RAM, removable battery, great GPU/CPU and get the cost low enough that it wipes the floor with Google's offerings and price point, we would have a viable fight on our hands.
It's strange that Amazon thought it would be successful when it was obvious to most people from day one that it won't be. I don't think it was even controversial that it would fail.
Having worked for a hw supplier to amazon in the past (though I had no information on the actual products, being in Eng.), I came here to say just that. It made much more sense when they started development.
Lab126 failed to deliver. This is why I respect Samsung, even though I am not fond of their practices. Samsung moves extremely fast and extremely shamelessly. Speed matters a lot, and they've proven it time and time again.
I'm surprised Amazon has doubled down on the idea of screwing their customers out of a good Android experience. That's all this is: Amazon ignored what was good for users (access to the whole Android ecosystem), and instead focused on what was good for Amazon's immediate desire to extract ongoing revenue from their customers.
Instead of making a better phone for consumers, they focused on making a better phone for Amazon. And, it turns out, "Makes Amazon richer", is on nobodies feature wish list for their next phone. Obviously, most folks probably don't mind Amazon making money...but, why would anyone buy a phone for which the only major differentiation is that it sends most of the long term app revenue to Amazon, and by doing so, limits the user to far fewer apps and less freedom to do with the phone what you want?
I'm almost amused at the gall of Amazon thinking they had the marketing and product chops to pull off an Apple-scale consumer-fleecing like this.
What I'm really curious about, but probably won't find out anytime soon, is what the internal politics on the development of this were like. Did somebody high up decide that Amazon had to have a phone, no matter how bad the market looked like for it, command that it be done, and the whole hierarchy went along with it, even though most of the company was kinda meh about it? Or did a critical mass of lower-level people inside the company really think that this was a good idea?
Most of the tech press and community had a feeling that it was a bad idea that was unlikely to ever go anywhere, and it's hard to believe that the entire company was unaware of this and of the market facts behind it.
I worked on this device. Every day we awaited the news that management had come to senses and cancelled the project. It was to my great surprise that it shipped at all.
I have to wonder if Amazon's failure to recognize the obvious here has anything to do with Bezos' "we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time." That statement has always kind of bothered me. I get what he was trying to say but I have to think they believe they can innovate against markets.
53 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912878
FTA: "When it launched a few months ago, it was $199"
$199 with the essentially non-optional AT&T plan. $649 regular price, which they would let you buy it at even though the phone was locked to AT&T no matter how you bought it. Into a market where the Nexus 5 already existed at $350 (fully unlocked) and Motorola had even cheaper options for very functional full-Android phones.
Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem (and I say that as a happy and high volume customer of Amazon Prime/Instant/Kindle).
I don't think it has anything to do with the restrictiveness, just that it was not very compelling and had 2 weird gimmicks no one really had a use for. That combined with the low visibility of Amazon as a phone manufacturer, I can really understand people held off buying.
Microsoft is having enough problems convincing people that a 3rd place app store is worth developing for, how was Amazon supposed to get in?
I like how Blackberry is considered 'effectively dead'; I've felt the same way since they failed to react to the iPhone.
The iPhone has a VERY LARGE ecosystem of software and hardware to support it. There is a lot of value there.
But the Fire Phone didn't have that. It ran a version of Android so they could have had a lot of stuff but instead they chose to prevent that. In the end it cost as much as their competitors but had no software and it's only unique features were somewhat gimmicky.
I mean, let's be real here, it's an extremely restricted platform that cuts you off from tons and I mean tons of great content on app stores we already have, content we're already familiar with.
And then it provides you with sub-par hardware at that price level and nothing more than gimmicks.
And one of the big reasons for all of this? To push a feature allowing people to point their phone at something and buy it on Amazon. Surprise, that's a software-based feature you could build for just about any phone.
The question "what does this phone do that others cannot" really was never answered with the Fire. (Other than that gimmicky perspective view thing)
Today if you launch something new you need to be able to compete with the value in the iOS and Android ecosystems to draw people and that's a VERY big hurdle. Microsoft is trying their hardest but can't get it done.
There is no surprise here. Amazon's software ability and follow through is best describe as "exists" and the third party ecosystem is tiny. I'd rather have any $200 Android phone (even a low quality one) than a free Fire Phone and I like Amazon.
"Here's a phone, it has no popular apps, and they'll probably never be available!" Yeah. Same thing that killed the Pre. Same thing that's killing Windows Mobile.
I have a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9' tablet, the hardware is top notch and there are plenty of apps. From what I know, if an Android app doesn't heavily rely on Google proprietary APIs, like Maps, it's trivial to put it on the Amazon store.
But yeah, the phone needed to be 2-3 times cheaper to sell well.
Call me when they can figure out that $.99 == $.99 100% of the time. [Hint: At least once every few months, this isn't true for at least one of their back end services and I have to clean up after it. This is just one issue of many they have, including the fact their "primary key" for items (ASINs) can be duplicated across multiple products.]
I think many, many people overestimate Amazon's technical capability.
They are competent but they are not special.
Hell, they can take up to 8 days to ship something from a warehouse sometimes.
I'm just saying that it's still too soon to say that nothing significantly better than iPhone and its apps, or cheaper than Android and its apps, will ever be possible from a third platform.
It takes systems—and individuals well versed in thinking in terms of them—to develop organizational intelligence that actually exceeds that of the individual. Building that type of organization is the hardest problem in business, but in my opinion, it is the only problem.
Start with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
Continue to this blog: http://blog.deming.org/
Read his dry and horribly written book if you want: http://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards-Deming/dp/0262541...
Or just head straight to something relevant and practical: http://www.amazon.com/The-Toyota-Way-Management-Manufacturer...
Moral of the story: Quality (all-encompassing quality, including everything from simple operational effectiveness, to market fit and understanding) comes from systems thinking.
That's an interesting comment. Isn't "phone" a software based feature you could build for just about any computer? I wonder if a fully featured general purpose mobile computer and ubiquitous wifi could make smartphones a thing of the past...
Sure it's limited in some of its tasks due to the display size and the efficiency of user input for things like text editing (e.g. writing a marketing plan, programming) etc.
The fact that it's also a phone I think is the least defining feature nowadays. I personally for example would rather do away with my ability to make and receive calls, than my ability to use internet (excluding Voip) for all the other applications on my phone. If you then consider that telephony is shifting towards being an internet-based service, and as you say the phone is just a software based feature, then yes I think we're getting to a place where calling these things 'smartphones' is as silly as continuing to call a computer/laptop a 'smart calculator' or 'smart typewriter' after 1990 or whatever.
I personally wouldn't ever buy one, much like I'd never get a Facebook phone, but it could be that there's people out there who might.
This highlights Amazons commitment to their customers. This is why Amazon will be #1 in the customer loyalty game in the long run. NO other company would keep this many bad reviews on their OWN product page.
V2.0 will be sooo much stronger because of this. Tough lesson to learn but invaluable internal motivation & feedback for the team.
Now if v2.0 isn't on AT&T, I will try it ....
If the Kindle Fire tablets had all cost the same price as an iPad, I seriously doubt they would be enjoying the popularity that they have today. It would appear that the thought process leading to the existence of that Fire Phone was that the Kindle Fire's success has less to do with price and more to do with Amazon.com ecosystem integration!
Does this mean that Amazon are out of the smartphone business because of one failure? Not necessarily. Amazon have the money, the power and means to release something spectacular, but they will need to learn from their mistakes as well as their competitors and go back to the drawing board. I honestly would not be surprised if they already have a new phone in the works already.
One area Amazon could beat their competitors on is price Even though you can already buy a whole bunch of affordable Android phones, they usually come with horrible hardware and are made of the cheapest materials possible. If they can release a phone with a decent camera, proper unrestricted Android OS, plenty of RAM, removable battery, great GPU/CPU and get the cost low enough that it wipes the floor with Google's offerings and price point, we would have a viable fight on our hands.
Lab126 failed to deliver. This is why I respect Samsung, even though I am not fond of their practices. Samsung moves extremely fast and extremely shamelessly. Speed matters a lot, and they've proven it time and time again.
If Amazon followed iterative approach to fine tune rather than one shot with super delay then it would have been a different story.
Instead of making a better phone for consumers, they focused on making a better phone for Amazon. And, it turns out, "Makes Amazon richer", is on nobodies feature wish list for their next phone. Obviously, most folks probably don't mind Amazon making money...but, why would anyone buy a phone for which the only major differentiation is that it sends most of the long term app revenue to Amazon, and by doing so, limits the user to far fewer apps and less freedom to do with the phone what you want?
I'm almost amused at the gall of Amazon thinking they had the marketing and product chops to pull off an Apple-scale consumer-fleecing like this.
Most of the tech press and community had a feeling that it was a bad idea that was unlikely to ever go anywhere, and it's hard to believe that the entire company was unaware of this and of the market facts behind it.