Yeah, so much this. There's a very sound principle within Amazon that one should "work backwards from the customer": pitch ideas for new products based on iden

Yeah, so much this. There's a very sound principle within Amazon that one should "work backwards from the customer": pitch ideas for new products based on identifying a clear customer need, then inventing a product that will fulfil that. But a lot of the pitches I saw were essentially working backwards from sales targets or existing tech - first, invent a customer with an insatiable desire to buy stuff in inexplicably odd ways ("I want to buy stuff by scanning it with my phone!") then invent a product to do that. The Fire Phone was probably the biggest example of this. I think it just started as somebody deciding that Amazon needed a phone, to drive sales like Android drove web use, and then they chucked in all sort of flashy tech that they happened to have on hand. Such a gigantic pile of WTF. At least the tablets started out with the idea that people were buying Kindles, listening to Amazon MP3, and watching Amazon Video, and perhaps somebody might want to combine all three in one device. The first Fire tablet was a shoddy pile of minimal-viable-product, but the later ones were fairly nice.