Bezos Says Amazon Pursuing Future Fire Phones
The Amazon Fire Phone hasn’t done so hot (haha get it), but apparently Amazon CEO and evil mastermind Jeff Bezos is undeterred. A post on Re/code today says that Bezos is far from done with his company’s first smartphone.
During an interview at the Business Insider’s conference in New York yesterday, Bezos was asked about the Fire Phone, to which he said, simply, “Ask me in some number of years.”
Bezos’s interviewer, Henry Blodget of Business Insider, continued and asked about Amazon’s mistakes with the Fire Phone. Bezos responded:
“I have made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com…literally. You might remember Pets.com or Kozmo.
None of those things are fun. They also don’t matter. Companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, eventually […] make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.”
In short, don’t be surprised to hear about the next Fire Phone early next year. It’s not too surprising, either, since Amazon hasn’t hesitated to throw money around until it finds success. It singlehandedly created the e-reader business with the original Kindle, a device that didn’t earn much in the way of solid reviews at first. Its Kindle Fire tablets have also found a decent amount of success, and have certainly provided a boost for Amazon’s ecosystem, since consumers who own Fire tablets spend more money on Amazon content and products.
All that aside, the Fire Phone and its weird, gimmicky 3D effects have been more than just a failure, but rather a monumental failure. What works on a tablet doesn’t work on a phone – users don’t want limitations placed on their smartphones, and the Fire OS is all about limitations in terms of what apps they can download and how well it plays with Google’s suite of services.
I’m curious to find out what Amazon has in store for the second iteration of the Fire Phone. If nothing else, Bezos and his underlings have a great playbook of what not to do. Hopefully they’ll read it and come up with something truly exciting for the Fire Phone’s second act.
[Source: Re/code]