Right on - the biggest (and IMO only truly relevant) reason why the Fire Phone flopped is because it doesn't benefit customers.
The Fire Phone wasn't built to be a superior phone, or give customers something truly new and useful. It was built to be an Amazon Content Delivery Device.
This is a phone whose primary raison d'etre is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. It's a distillation of a platform strategy, not the desire to produce a genuine product.
Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.
> Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.
The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship you one. That sort of thing isn't the problem because it's actually useful.
As an example of what they're doing wrong, Amazon is charging the same 30% in their app store as Apple and Google. They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats. That would get more apps in their store, get all the app developers promoting their devices and put pressure on Apple and Google to charge lower rates to anyone including Amazon who wants to sell content to people locked into the competing app stores. Their competitors look like profiteers if they don't respond and lose revenue if they do.
They're trying to enter a market and beat the incumbents at their own game when they could be making them play Amazon's game instead.
The Kindle Fire tablets are also designed to sell Amazon content, but they benefit the customer with their rock-bottom pricing which the Fire Phone did not have.
I have one of the original Fire tablets, and would not buy another one if not for the express purpose of delivering Amazon content - videos in that case, since the actual reading experience is far superior on a real Kindle. It's not a bad tablet, but not having the Google apps, as well as something relatively close to stock Android, makes it not as useful as it could have been.
They also benefit from the fact that tablets (at least in my experience) are primarily content consumption devices, whether that's books, videos, or games.
Well... the kindle was pretty much just a device "to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon." But there were no other competitors at the time. The fire phone was going up against a huge market of phone devices with many better features and ecosystems already.
I would argue Kindles benefit the consumer in that they're also enjoyable reading experiences. You can carry a library's worth of books in your backpack on a device with a wonderful screen.
if you like to read, the kindle paperwhite is amazing. so much better than reading on an ipad or iphone, and you can carry/instantly download so many books/pdfs you find online (browser button automatically sends it to your kindle)/etc... Great for reading, actually benefits the customer.
The Fire Phone wasn't built to be a superior phone, or give customers something truly new and useful. It was built to be an Amazon Content Delivery Device.
This is a phone whose primary raison d'etre is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. It's a distillation of a platform strategy, not the desire to produce a genuine product.
Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.