
Why Did Amazon Make a Phone? A Conversation With Jeff Bezos - 127001brewer
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/why-did-amazon-make-a-phone-a-conversation-with-jeff-bezos/
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napoleoncomplex
My expectation and the expectation of my social circle was that Amazon is
going to come out with some crazy pricing, subsidizing the phone with future
purchases, and offering a 99$ phone, no contract.

All of the tech is neat, but the reaction is more "cool gimmick", not "must
have feature". And at that price, "cool gimmick" is not a phone seller.
Samsung can pull that off because they pour an insane amount of money into
marketing, and have spent years developing the brand to this point. To price
yourself at that level, with no market share, competing with gimmicks, seems
insane.

The next big winner in market share is going to be someone like Motorola,
cheap, great and simple phones, not a new Samsung.

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josefresco
Samsung didn't win due to their extensive marketing. They released a viable
contender to the iPhone, and then went about improving it for 5+ generations.
Success brought in more money for marketing, but they did it right in the
first place and kept iterating. See HTC as an example of a company with a good
initial phone and marketing budget but who couldn't keep up and fell behind.

~~~
MBCook
Samsung spends an ENORMOUS amount of money on marketing compared to Apple.
Here's a graph from about two years ago:

[https://twitter.com/asymco/status/396253597551570944](https://twitter.com/asymco/status/396253597551570944)

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bluthru
The Amazon brand is all over the place for me.

Great products: Kindle, Fire TV.

Cheap product: Kindle Fire.

Costly product: Fire Phone.

I guess when I see a phone like this with a big Amazon logo on the back:
[http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/HT_bgr_amazon_smartphon...](http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/HT_bgr_amazon_smartphone_sk_140618_4x3_992.jpg)
I assume it's like a Kindle Fire in that it's a cheap option, but it's not at
all, which is confusing. Does Bezos want to make the Amazon brand more
valuable? Will consumers really view this device as a peer to the iPhone 5s/6
and Galaxy S5?

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higherpurpose
Amazon should stick with "affordable", and win money on content. Amazon won
out initially because of affordable prices, too. This "we're just like Apple"
strategy will not work. They should be Xiaomi, not Apple.

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exhilaration
Interesting that Bezos is actually dogfooding this phone. Compare that to
Facebook's failed attempts at Facebook phone(s) and the "Home" Android effort
-- Zuckerberg never gave up his iPhone. Perhaps that's the clearest way to
tell when a company is really behind a new product: is the CEO using it?

~~~
jacquesm
I'm trying to imagine Jobs using an android phone and that really shows how
absurd it is that Zuckerberg would not use his own company's gear.

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peterwwillis
_" But that’s not what the phone is about. It has to stand on its own as a
fantastic phone. It even has to make phone calls."_

I chuckled here, but seriously, why do we even call these things 'smartphones'
anymore? The voice calling aspect has been the forgotten feature for years.

I remember getting a cheap Android phone and the whole dialpad UI would freeze
up, or I couldn't answer the damn thing when it rang because the UI was
locking up due to god know's what. Mine still lags, but is fast enough to
react within about 5 seconds of me pressing a "button". Same for clicking on
the voice-command feature.... I hear the audible "ping", and 5 seconds later
the display comes up.

Let's be realistic: all smartphones are basically just handheld tablets whose
radios/SIMs happen to allow access to voice channels.

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bentcorner
I wonder how Firefly is going to work out. Sure, you can scan an item and buy
it on Amazon, which is advertised as taking impulse buying to the next level,
but what I'm wondering is that if you're standing there, in the store, what
could be more impulse buying that just buying the thing _right there_ in the
store?

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timbre
I've been assuming the use case is that you're _not_ in a store. The world is
Amazon's showroom.

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weavie
Or you are in the store, you see something you like, you point your phone at
the item, press a button and buy it from Amazon.

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ghobs91
I think making firefly part of the Amazon app, or even as a standalone app,
would have more effectively accomplished their "impulse buying" task.

Asking people to switch to a phone with inferior app selection and a clunky UI
in order to be immersed in the Amazon experience seems a bit short sighted to
me.

High end specs have become a commodity, the top priority the average user has
when buying a smartphone is whether it has the apps they use. Try convincing a
friend of yours to switch to Windows Phone, and the first thing they'll ask is
"does it have x+y apps?" Ecosystem is everything.

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wil421
Just because you are a tech company doesnt mean you have to make a phone.
Whatever happened to that facebook phone?

Or the IBM phone:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon)

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plg
handheld vending machine

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franciscomello
I think Amazon is slowly taking a very significant place in this market that
previously was dominated by Apple. I myself now have 2 Kindles at home, and a
fire TV. Would definitely give the phone a try if my IPhone wasn't new. And
he's doing it without buzz..

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Epicawesomehn
Here's why Amazon nsde a pho e: 1\. To make consumers a part of the Amazon
Ecosystem. 2\. To make it easiertfor existing users to access the Amazon
Ecosystem. 3\. To entice Prime User 4\. To make it easier to buy anything and
everything using Firefly.

~~~
free2rhyme214
It's obvious why Amazon made a phone. Profit. People visit Amazon. Amazon has
millions of customers. Sell them something else and Amazon makes even more
money.

Amazon isn't trying to make the best product in the world but I'm not gonna
lie, the Kindle Fire newest version is pretty good compared to the first
models.

To finish my statement, Amazon is sucking up revenue wherever possible. They
aren't trying to win the smartphone race but just trying to get a piece of the
pie. It's smart and profitable.

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segmondy
Amazon made a phone because it has become a big company with no vision. Making
tablets was in, so they made one, making phone is in, they are making one.
Maybe in 5 years, making your own VR headset will be in and they will make one
as well.

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jacquesm
You can accuse amazon of a lot but not having vision is something I'd be very
careful with.

Kindle, AWS and a whole pile of other things were quite the gamble when the
launched them.

~~~
josefresco
Agreed, if anything they have better longer-term vision and discipline than
any of the large tech entities. What seems like an also-ran product now will
most likely turn out to be a no-brainer in 5-10 years (not quarters)

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sanowski
Laughable! what is the cost of 16GB these days? Stopped reading after that
answer, but keep going if you like advertorials.

Q. I was surprised that you weren’t competing on price so aggressively. This
is essentially the same price as rival devices.

A. Well, it’s 32 gigabytes instead of 16, which is a big deal.....

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gdilla
Cost has nothing to do with price. It's all about customer perception and
their willingness to pay. Handbags cost very little to make, but some are
priced at $800 and some are $8.

16GB more on an iphone 5 is $100 more _in price_. That is the choice given to
the customer.

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sanowski
My point is that knowing Amazon's business model, It's surprising they are
openly playing the margin game on this device and bleeding the buyer vs.
recouping that $100 in Amazon purchases.

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bitJericho
I think it's much more likely that Amazon chose this price so that users
didn't think it was a piece of junk.

Users are used to paying 600 for a phone. A 100 dollar Android phone works
like shit. Add to that, if they priced it well below market value, then third
parties would come in, buy up all the phones and stick them on ebay.

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gdilla
Right. They want the perception of it to be a best in class smartphone.

