Fast Company:
Introduced with grand ambitions last summer, the Fire Phone is widely seen as a fiasco. Originally priced at $199 and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory.
Yet Bezos finally answers the question with the kind of reasoning that investors, customers, and pundits have come to expect from him: Amazon is going to pour more resources into its phone. Defending the Fire Phone as a “bold bet,” Bezos argues that it’s “going to take many iterations” and “some number of years” to get it right.
I don’t think the Fire Phone will be around in two years.
I never understood why companies (Amazon) just jump into a product category just because another company (Apple) is successful. And competing with Apple, being as good as Apple products is not good enough because of the established ecosystem.
So, in order to surpass Apple, company must innovate something way beyond an “iPhone” to get people to switch. By way beyond, I don’t mean larger pixels, faster processor, etc..etc. It has to be things like this phone does your laundry, mows the lawn, etc. The bar must be very very high.
Bezos has delusions of being something other than a commodity profiteer, as Ursula Le Guin called Amazon. The Kindle made good sense as a clever, one-purpose conduit to that ambition, but even its higher-end models are commodity tech. Arriving when it did, the Fire Phone is a billionaire’s act of hubris, however.
Still, I hope he continues to push the idea of an Amazon smartphone, if only to accidentally stumble upon some potentially good ideas that improve the sector as a whole. Imagine, for example, if he decided he wanted to provide cheaper wireless connectivity.
Not a great fan, but I wouldn’t bet against Amazon’s ability to persevere.