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Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices
- ihsw 11y agoPaywall.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agohttps://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Amazon+Curtails+Development+of+Consumer+Devices&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Amazon+...
- pkinsky 11y agoI can't wait for pallet-loads of fire phones to hit the market at scrap metal prices.
- marpstar 11y ago"I'd buy that for a dollar!"
- dlubarov 11y agoNo need to wait! Amazon lowered the price to $130 today - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC0USA6 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC0USA6 It 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?
- AjithAntony 11y agoOne could value the headphones and charger at $20, so an $11 phone!
- spydum 11y agointerestingly, I just had one in my cart, and now they are "currently unavailable".
- ljk 11y ago> Currently unavailable. > We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock. Unfortunately they're out for now
- jayess 11y agoI had to get a new phone and considered a fire-sale Fire Phone, but I figured that there would be no updates whatsoever.
- joshmn 11y agoDirect link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQqQIwAGoVChMIiMuUi5XIxwIVCUOSCh1Siwok&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Famazon-curtails-development-of-consumer-devices-1440632203&ei=Am_eVYjCM4mGyQTSlqqgAg&usg=AFQjCNF872MmRCMAaSGdVOXSnHnQjM7ZKA&sig2=Fl_rz0wRHvyZzLtEmDCnaQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- walterbell 11y ago> 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. Will this be a competitor to the Google router?
- beambot 11y agoProbably a more-capable version of Amazon Echo.
- jonlucc 11y agoI think the more pertinent question is "will the Google Hub become a competitor to the Echo anytime soon?".
- seibelj 11y agoIt'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".
- codeonfire 11y agoYou 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.
- pjc50 11y agoThat's exactly what this whole thread is about: doing things that please the top level of the company but are hard to sell to actual customers.
- 11y ago
- an4rchy 11y agoAmazon fires Fire phone engineers.... /s 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...
- rifung 11y agoIndeed. 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.
- dmoy 11y agoWhen 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. (Maybe not impossible, but harder)
- umeshunni 11y agoMoreover, it's very likely that these are hardware engineers, not SWEs.
- gjolund 11y agoWhy is this always the case? 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".
- pcurve 11y agoBWC - business worship culture. He who holds the purse string holds the power.
- mentos 11y ago"In essence, we were not building the phone for the customer—we were building it for Jeff" http://www.fastcompany.com/3039887/under-fire http://www.fastcompany.com/3039887/under-fire
- khnd 11y agowhat happened to customer obsession. leadership principles 101 bro.
- rdtsc 11y ago> what happened to customer obsession. It worked. He was the customer.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- andrewguenther 11y agoThis is exactly what the Fire Phone was lacking, and I think that the entire company can learn a lesson from it.
- LiweiZ 11y agoIt seems not quite different from what Jobs did. The real difference is the degree of vision associated with reality.
- blinkingled 11y agoI 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.
- rifung 11y agoHonestly 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.
- blinkingled 11y ago>reason was so that people would think it's high end, and not dismiss it as a low/mid range phone. Wow, that is whole another level of disconnect with reality!
- knappe 11y agoHardly. The adage 'You get what you pay for' has been proven to have real consequences. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/january18/shiv-011806.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/january18/shiv-011806.htm...
- tsunamifury 11y agoI 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.
- ryanhuff 11y agoThat'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.
- IBM 11y agoThe 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.
- mehwoot 11y agoThe 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mrschwabe 11y agoGlad the Fire phone has flopped, simply on the basis that it will help reduce confusion for people looking for a Firefox phone.
- HelloMcFly 11y agoAnyone proactively looking for a Firefox phone seems unlikely to also fall into the camp of people that would be confused by the Amazon Fire phone.
- Crito 11y agoAh yes, possibly the only phone less successful than fire phone...
- KamiCrit 11y agoThis place should be called Amazon News.
- Animats 11y agoIt'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. Oh, right, they also made a phone.
- sea2summit 11y agoThe 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.
- megablast 11y agoWasn't the phone ridiculously expensive with lots of features that nobody wanted? Once again, betting on 3d leads to a loss.
- sea2summit 11y agoYes it was premium hardware; I believe it would have been successful as an Android phone. My wife actually liked the gimmicky 3D. Go figure.
- ewzimm 11y agoI'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.
- dont_pm_me 11y agoHow did your wife flash to CM? I believe the Fire Phone bootloader is still locked, so I'm not really sure how that's possible.
- sea2summit 11y agoShe used KingRoot. Instructions here: https://goo.gl/ukUc1W https://goo.gl/ukUc1W
- bitJericho 11y agoI 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.
- amaks 11y agoI might be missing something, but why lay off engineers as opposed to moving them to other divisions/groups? As a punishment for a screwed up product?
- codeonfire 11y agoManagement usually thinks engineers are expendable, re-hire-able, and fungible. They think they will just hire some new ones if a need arises.
- anonfunction 11y agoIs 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.
- gojomo 11y agoMy 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.
- ericfrederich 11y agoGreat... 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
- sgustard 11y agoIs 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.
- andrewguenther 11y agoThe link title is misleading, this is only talking about the Fire Phone
- yalogin 11y agoI 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?
- pjc50 11y agoSee all of the "why is Amazon such a terrible employer" articles on HN recently. They don't care about their people.
- pbreit 11y agoShould 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.
- reality_czech 11y agoSo the whole team was Fired? Sounds like the guys running it were some real Bozos.
- nso95 11y agoBezos