But at a certain point, you just think, Well, this guy has been right so many times before.” This is a common curse of success: it makes people believe that everything you touch will turn to gold, rather than understanding your circle of competence. “Yes, there was heated debate about whether it was heading in the right direction. Former members of the Fire Phone team described the development experience as building a phone for Bezos, rather than the customer. Facebook also made a short-lived swing at creating their own phone. The upside of getting this right was likely too big a deal to ignore. Not owning the hardware on which people access your product posed an existential risk. Why would they pursue it? At the turn of the 2010s, mobile was the new ascending paradigm. In short, the Fire Phone strategy was at odds with Amazon’s DNA and its position in the world. The killer feature of the smartphone is the app ecosystem, which fails to flourish without clearing enough consumer demand .The beauty of the smartphone is that it does many jobs well, and a company whose primary goal is to sell people more things doesn’t have the right incentives to be a neutral platform.It pursued a vertical strategy to serve a subset of customers, contrary to its horizontal strategy of being the everything store for everyone. ![]() It was priced on par with the iPhone (so much for “your margin is my opportunity”).It was a product that rejected the Amazon way, planting the seeds for its failure:
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