When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get into the smartphone game, he went all in. And the result was a device: fire phoneturned out to be more packed with big ideas than any gadget you'll find anywhere. There was just one small problem: they were mostly bad ideas.
The Fire Phone was released in 2014 with a list of features a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were about 400 cameras! The entire home screen was filled with something called “deliciousness!” But the Fire Phone was, first and foremost, a way to buy things on Amazon. After all, this is what Bezos wanted. It's simple not what users wanted.
For this episode Version history, we tell the Fire Phone story from start to finish. (It won't take long.) David Pearce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O'Kane discuss how the Kindle's success led to Amazon's expanded hardware plans, the brewing fight with Apple over app store policies, Bezos's own stewardship of the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing failed. Just a few months after launch, the Fire Phone could be purchased for less than a dollar. People still didn't want it.
In the end, the device that was supposed to be the start of something big for Amazon turned out to be actually very small. But that doesn't make his story any less interesting.
This is the fifth episode Version history. (We're already more than halfway through the first season!) If you want to find the series, there are three good places:
Thanks to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show and left a review! We're already preparing the next batch of episodes and want to hear everything you think we should do or not do or do differently. What other major product failures deserve their own episode? You tell us. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the history of the Fire Phone, here are some links to get you started:
