cremnob posted:

Bezos didn’t want a me-too device

quote:

As Carr tells it, the Fire Phone succumbed to misplaced ambitions and micromanagement from Bezos. Amazon's strength has been value and convenience, but Bezos wanted the Fire Phone to stake out new territory for the company, allowing it to compete with "cool" brands like Apple. As a result, he obsessively monitored the project. "Even the very smallest decisions needed to go through him," one Amazon employee told Carr. By the end, the team had given up building a phone for consumers and shifted building one that would satisfy Bezos's ambitions.

The article describes Bezos' singular focus on features that could set the Fire Phone apart, taking it out of the realm of entry-level phones and into competition with high-end brands. According to Carr, the team considered hands-free interaction systems and a force-sensitive grip as ways to set the phone apart, but ultimately settled on the Fire Phone's much-criticized dynamic perspective feature, which allowed the phone to track a user's face and change perspective depending on the angle of viewing. In the end, the system drove up costs without providing any real utility to the end customer, entirely driven by Bezos. "He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why," another insider told FastCo, describing dynamic perspective. "Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.' No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one."

The Management posted:

graph posted:

boy this weird thing happens when all these tech ceos try to be steve jobs

maniacdevnull posted:

uss timphone 6+ is scheduled for sea trials next month

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

i really hope they make an iphone 5 sized iphone 7

graph posted:

iphone 6s mini may be a thing

graph posted:

iphone 6s mini may be a thing

maniacdevnull posted:

lol

making a bunch of skus in all kinds of sizes, and a smartwatch. apple is literally a fast-follow for samsung. can't wait for the applefridge announcement at macworld.

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

do you have any serious sources

qirex posted:

being a control freak only works if you have good taste and even a cursory glance at any given amazon product page [another thing bezos supposedly likes to micromanage] demonstrates his taste level

cremnob posted:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3039887/under-fire

But pricing a smartphone was complicated. Bezos didn’t want a me-too device, and the margins a low-cost phone could garner would be minimal, even if it did manage to stand out in an ocean of cheap devices. The only solution, some inside the organization argued, was to differentiate the hardware enough to justify a higher price point and hope to go after some of Apple’s profits. But Apple is a ferocious competitor as well, whose dominance in high-end products was made possible by decades of rigorous R&D, a world-class design team, and its unrivaled approach to hardware and software. The idea that Amazon, a neophyte hardware maker whose CEO has shown no special affinity for design, could successfully attack Apple might seem quixotic.

Yet Bezos had profound reasons for preferring a top-of-the-line smartphone. Multiple sources indicate that the premium phone represented a "repositioning of the brand away from being so utilitarian and toward becoming more of a lifestyle brand like Apple," as the high-ranking Lab126 designer phrases it. Bezos expressed some of these sentiments himself in a memo he wrote years ago, entitled "Amazon.love." In the memo, first revealed by journalist Brad Stone in The Everything Store, Bezos describes his vision to transform Amazon into a brand such as Apple, Nike, or Disney, which are "widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool." Brands like Walmart and Microsoft, he noted, are "unloved" and suffer as a result. He then listed the attributes that distinguished each set of companies: "Risk taking is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Close-following is not cool."

Shaggar posted:

idk the ipad is actually useful as a device to browse the web very slowly whilst watching tv. or to look up something in imdb.app.

iwatch has no purpose.

graph posted:

lips are looser now that stebe (pbuh) is gone

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

i meant an article or something

cremnob posted:

Bezos describes his vision to transform Amazon into a brand such as Apple, Nike, or Disney, which are "widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool." Brands like Walmart and Microsoft, he noted, are "unloved" and suffer as a result.

The Management posted:

but ultimately settled on the Fire Phone's much-criticized dynamic perspective feature, which allowed the phone to track a user's face and change perspective depending on the angle of viewing. In the end, the system drove up costs without providing any real utility to the end customer, entirely driven by Bezos. "He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why," another insider told FastCo, describing dynamic perspective. "Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.' No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one."

black man 3 posted:

Take it to IYG noob.

poty posted:

yay cremnob is back

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

do you have any serious sources? my verizon contract is up in march and i really don't want to get a hugephone if i can wait until september and get a normal human sized phone

Shaggar posted:

amazon's website is so amazingly bad and the way they curate products is insane. its amazing they sell anything at all

mishaq posted:

can you wipe away the terrible amazonness and make one just a standard anroid phone?

mishaq posted:

can you wipe away the terrible amazonness and make one just a standard anroid phone?

Captain Foo posted:

does gary busey have one of these things too