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The Fire Phone Debacle and What It Means For Amazon's Future
HughPickens.com points out an article at Fast Company that dug into the creation of Amazon's floundering Fire Phone to figure out why the company pushed so hard to bring it to market. The piece is an indictment of Jeff Bezos's determination to make the Fire Phone into a competitor for an already-saturated high-end smartphone market. "This wasn't some vague guideline from an executive busy running other parts of the business; based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former employees, most of whom were deeply involved with the project, the CEO drove every aspect of the phone’s creation from the outset."
Now that Amazon's growth is slowing and profits have yet to be seen, investors and analysts have run out of patience for gambles like this one. "What makes the Fire Phone a particularly troubling adventure, however, is that Amazon’s CEO seemingly lost track of the essential driver of his company’s brand. It’s understandable that Bezos would want to give Amazon a premium shine, but to focus on a high-end product, instead of the kind of service that has always distinguished the company, proved misguided."
Now that Amazon's growth is slowing and profits have yet to be seen, investors and analysts have run out of patience for gambles like this one. "What makes the Fire Phone a particularly troubling adventure, however, is that Amazon’s CEO seemingly lost track of the essential driver of his company’s brand. It’s understandable that Bezos would want to give Amazon a premium shine, but to focus on a high-end product, instead of the kind of service that has always distinguished the company, proved misguided."
> "but to focus on a high-end product, instead of the kind of service that has always distinguished the company, proved misguided."
What service suffered as a result of this? The product ended up not being what was desired by the public, but what specifically would have fixed this? Just saying "with 20-20 hindsight, that wasn't a good use of your time" is meaningless. When you have built a multi-billion dollar business, you can claim that you have better judgement, until then you are just making noise
David Lang
Amazon has tried to create their own product lines with the Kindle and Fire branding, but unlike Sears' branding for Craftsman and Kenmore, the Kindle and Fire devices are less ends, and more means, at least in my eye, and when they hamstring the phone version by basically taking everything useful out of Android that made it popular (ie, Google's through-the-internet connectivity for 'cloud' stuff) they take away most of the means for which I would use the device.
I honestly don't care what brand of smartphone I have any more than I care what brand of business computer I have at work, in that the phones I buy run vanilla or close-to-vanilla Android, and the computers my work supplies for me generally run Windows, or I install Linux on them myself. The Fire Phone isn't really Android in that what I want to use Android for isn't there, and the experience would be just as foreign to me as using an iPhone or a Blackberry or a Windows phone.
Amazon over-valued their own brand. Amazon is a service more than a product, and attempting to be a product hasn't worked as well for them as they expected.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They risked a gamble, so what. Companies build products that fails - it's not even a headline. Amazon built something that people think is a failure, then everyone went to bed, woke up the next day and everyone moved on.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Some 33% of the fortune 400 have inherited their wealth. All six children of Sam Walton are in fortune 400. The Koch brothers, for all their manipulation and access to the government would have more money if they had just invested their inheritance in index funds.
People without inheritance, even if they make it to top 1% by income, most of them will not be able to accumulate to make it to top 1% by net worth. Of the 97% of the Americans who don't inherit much, about 2% barely make it to a million net worth including their home equity. It takes 4 million to crack the 1% by networth mark. These low end millionaires with home equity are what counted to tout "95% of the millionaires are self made". Most of the people below the fortune 400 but in the top half of the 1% are all inheritors, with more than 15 million dollars of financial net worth. Working stiffs never get a shot at getting there.
These trust fund babies are not as smart as their daddy or mommy who made the dough. How many children of Nobel prize winners win Nobel prizes? It is called regression to the mean, and these trust fund babies are below average. They control some 50% of all the investments. They reward loyalty not competence. That misallocation of capital is detrimental to all of us. We need to tax estates with more than 5 million dollar worth significantly.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact