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They are refunding for them. But in my opinion, you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has. Amazon has cancelled lo
by thrtythreeforty 2y ago
They are refunding for them. But in my opinion, you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has.
Amazon has cancelled lots of consumer stuff in the past (the Alexa buttons or whatever they were) but cancelling business-facing things is new. Businesses are much more cancellation averse than forgetful consumers have proven to be.
- qubex 2y agoDon’t forget their Fire Phone.
- reducesuffering 2y agoThis is practically the same management that produced Fire Phone. It's actually quite something. This division of Amazon management produced Fire Phone, was forgiven and produced Alexa to superficial success so were allowed to then produce this. When now we know that all these projects were huge money trash fires.
- sib 2y agoSorry, but the team that produced Alexa (& Echo) were completely separate from the team that produced the Fire Phone. There were distinct product teams, design teams, software engineering teams, hardware teams, and GM-equivalents (Amazon didn't really call people GM so much in those days.) (Unless you're talking about the entirety of Dave Limp's organization, which produced a lot of things...)
- bmitc 2y agoI think that's actually worse. It's several disparate teams failing in similar ways. It makes Amazon looknfoolosh with their hiring process and "principles".
- rnewme 2y agoIt's hard to do products, even if you have Amazon funding.
- simfree 2y agoEspecially when you exit talent on constant hamster wheel that they run. It really is a great way to light money on fire though!
- TylerE 2y agoIt’s pretty clearly not a localized issue. Look at the whole gaming division/Lumberyard.
- simfree 2y agoAmazon can never keep people long enough to actually ship a video game. No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset. It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.
- hughesjj 2y agoIDK, the pirate software guy said Amazon was worlds better than blizzard, and the gaming industry isn't known for job stability. Lots of fire after game is shipped and rehire under another contract.
- philwelch 2y agoAlso, IIRC, the Fire Phone was heavily influenced by the personal involvement of Jeff Bezos himself.
- simfree 2y agoShipping a 1366 by potato screen phone with an outdated version of Android, and an app store that was missing most apps. AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.
- toast0 2y agoThey did court apps with AWS credits and things (at least they did for the one I was working on). I think they didn't realize (or plan for) the part where apps had dependencies on other Googley stuff. Can't just push the apk to Amazon too, if Amazon doesn't have a workalike maps api, etc. When the Fire phone was on Fire sale, it was a pretty good value for users though. The launcher was weird, but you could smuggle Google Play store on it, and it had a good processor.
- RyJones 2y agoProject B veteran reporting! Everyone I worked with on Fire Phone knew it was doomed.
- zaptrem 2y agoWhy did they give it such mediocre hardware and old software?
- RyJones 2y agoI can only make informed guesses. My feeling is the phone was shipped as a contractual obligation on both sides. Think the Microsoft kin phone and Verizon as an analog.
- sib 2y agoIt was delayed a looooong time and the hardware/OS was locked fairly early. If it had been released when originally planned, it would not have felt so old. I still don't think it would necessarily have rocked the world; too many other issues.
- simfree 2y agoI still remember the day that AT&T came out and discounted all Fire phones to 99 cents on a zero-term contract for postpaid customers. The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful. AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.
- dustincoates 2y agoYou could for a while get a Fire Phone for something like $100, which included a year Prime subscription. That meant that you were paying around $20 for a phone and what were actually some pretty good pack-in wired earbuds at a time when wireless earbuds weren't a thing. I did this, and the phone was serviceable once you rooted it, so long as you remembered the price you paid for it.
- aitchnyu 2y agoIn 2012 they were begging some Android apps to launch in Fire store (their Android app store).
- hughesjj 2y agoActually, the s5 launched in April 2014, so it's an even worse comparison.
- 999900000999 2y agoAs long as they refund people it's all good. Would of been nice for them to open source the SDK too.
- wongarsu 2y agoTo a consumer it's fine. For a business the amount of money spent is only one part of the equation. Some places will have spent significant time both in the procurement process and setting this thing up. Time that can be translated to opportunity cost. As the person proposing such purchases you want to be able to show successes. Amazon just bricking it means you don't have much to show for, probably burnt political capital for nothing to get these, and if anyone was opposed to getting these they are now proven right. Both on the organizational and individual level these kinds of things are far more impactful in business products than in a hobbyist product
- hdhshdhshdjd 2y agoExactly, time is money. Amazon wasted customer time, therefore money. Very bad look.
- CydeWeys 2y agoIt's also not necessarily super easy to refund money to a business. I know that accounts receivable at my company is a serious pain in the ass, and it's not a given that refunds on anything purchased via PO are gonna be easy or quick. And of course there are restrictions on how you can purchase things that might easily have required these to be bought via PO (rather than corporate CC).
- j16sdiz 2y agoIt's not only a refund. It's a refund + $300 credits. Have fun doing accounting for those credits.
- Someone 2y ago> To a consumer it's fine. Is it? Let’s say I buy a Foo rather than a Bar because it brings better value for money. A few months later, the device is bricked, and I get my money back, but Bar doesn’t sell my 2nd choice anymore or it got more expensive. Even if it isn’t, I may have made additional investments in time (e.g. learning how to operate it) or money (e.g. buying an longer charging cable) that I won’t get back.
- FireBeyond 2y agoThe Amazon buttons were arguably wasteful, but kinda cool. I had a few mounted on the back of the cabinet door under my kitchen sink... Out of garbage bags? Press the button. Out of dishwasher tabs? Press another button. Rinse aid? Same.
- OJFord 2y agoThey probably resulted in too many returns/complaints over price, I suspect. I use 'subscribe & save', but I necessarily monitor & adjust it, otherwise it is absolutely not '& save'. Or it is, but only relative to the Amazon non-subscription price at that time, from that seller, with absolutely no guarantee it's reasonable. For me it's just a way to get 15% off stuff that isn't too time-sensitive. Running a little low, stock up. Same way people use Costco or similar if there's one convenient I suppose. (Tangential, but would be great if you could subscribe on a price basis: send me two of these with my S&S order if the price is below £12.34 or whatever (and not otherwise).)
- martinald 2y agoYeah I find S&S very odd. You'd think Amazon would know how to do this properly with their logistical and pricing prowess, but the price swings all over the place (sometimes to ludicrous levels) and items are often out of stock/backordered for weeks. It reminds me of Uber's prebook a taxi, which (may have changed), doesn't prebook anything and if there aren't any ubers when you booked you are out of luck.
- Reason077 2y agoI’ve had good luck with subscribe and save in the UK. It seems to take the lowest recent price for each product, so there haven’t been many times I was surprised by a high price - but a lot of times that I was pleased with a low price! The trick is to go in and review the order before it’s due to ship (you get an email reminder) and cancel/substitute/defer any items you don’t need or that are priced too high. Occasionally I’ve also noticed items that are showing out of stock on the product page, but they still managed to find stock for my S&S order.
- bastawhiz 2y agoIn fairness to Amazon, my understanding is that existing Dash buttons haven't been sunset, they just stopped selling them. The one consumer device that I do know that they bricked was the Dash Wand, which was like a handheld Dash Button but you ordered with voice (like Alexa) or barcode. I think very few people actually had one, though.
- cameron_b 2y agoThe dash button was sadly bricked. It was replaced by a widget in the app that was better at upselling.
- whycome 2y agoIts only a matter of time before we have “smart containers” that will tell Amazon when your laundry detergent is low.
- justusthane 2y agoMaybe, maybe not. The Dash button was basically a much simpler, cheaper version of that and it clearly didn’t work.
- tylerrobinson 2y agoThis exists as wifi-connected scales with Bottomless[1]. My gut reaction is that Bottomless is laughably absurd, an IoT device and middleman in search of a problem. But I’m trying to analyze it fairly. In what circumstance is this better than a normal product subscription that allows skips? Anyone actually used it or know someone that uses it loyally? 1. https://www.bottomless.com/ https://www.bottomless.com/
- john01dav 2y agoI'm way too cheap to buy something like that myself, but I see a clear value proposition. Firstly, if your use rate is variable (maybe you bake only sporadically), that breaks any regular subscription. Secondly, it removes the human error of possibly failing to cancel the subscription, or failing to order.
- crazygringo 2y ago> you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has. That's just not true. Companies cancel things all the time. Obviously these weren't exactly selling well -- what else is a company supposed to do? The fact that literally no other company has the reputation for cancelling things that Google has, should tell you that their reputation is something very specific to Google, for whatever reason.
- torstenvl 2y agoDiscontinuing a product is different from making an already-sold product unusable. It isn't entirely honest to pretend they're the same thing.
- surajrmal 2y agoThese days, a lot of products rely on talking to servers in the cloud for functionality. These products very often become unusable when a product is canceled because they lose a great deal of functionality. Only products which have sold well seem to have those servers remain operational for an extended time period beyond when sales end.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago> a lot of products rely on talking to servers in the cloud for functionality That's the whole fucking problem! People buy computers but cannot change the software running on them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 2y agoBut they gave customers a total refund and then even extra credits on top of that. This is a cloud connected device so it seems like an entirely fair outcome. If they didn't refund customers then I would be complaining too, but that's simply not the case here.
- ObscureMind 2y agoI stopped trusting Amazon a long time ago. They've been canceling plenty of hardware devices, and on the top of it Prime is not even worth it anymore.
- Semaphor 2y ago> on the top of it Prime is not even worth it anymore. I had been thinking about cancelling, when something happened that made me disappointed in their customer service, something that used to be top of the line for Amazon. Didn’t even get offered a free month of Prime for their fuckup. Made the decision easy. But since then, they’ve been incessant, trying to get me to buy Prime again on literally every order. At least now it’s up to 1 free month if I come back, at first they tried 1 free week. I know, I know, "ads always and forever work", and if I say anything else I’m some arrogant idiot, but this is once again advertising that leaves a sour taste in my mouth and is certainly something I remember.
- AzzyHN 2y agoAlso, Amazon buttons are dumb and cheap. Robots are not.
- itsdrewmiller 2y agoI think there is a pretty big difference between canceling a weird niche product that probably wouldn’t exist anywhere else vs. canceling your fourth basic messaging service to replace it with a nearly identical clone. I am happy Amazon shoots for the moon on devices and hope they continue to do so.
- itishappy 2y agoOn the other hand, one of the two still has with a working solution available.