Jeff Bezos bold bet on the Fire Phone and it’s Impact to Amazon’s Latest Products and Services
Amazon has been very ambitious on its latest products and services. Amazon’s latest services Prime Now and Prime Photos are giving Amazon customers even bigger opportunities in enjoying their Amazon Prime membership. WorkMail, a recently launched email and calendaring application under Amazon Web Services (AWS), is giving the company higher recognition in the cloud computing industry. The Fire TV Stick which was released last October 2014 is still making big headlines in the consumer electronics world.
These are just some of Amazon’s products and services that made millions of consumers happy and created good stories for journalists to write. And I was one of them.
Curios about Amazon’s huge popularity in the tech and ecommerce space, I decided to go over this news that circulated around the tech business community in 2014 – the Fire Phone. Here’s my brief analysis of the story.
Jeff Bezos’ bold bet on Fire Phone
Amazon reported a net loss of $437 million in the third quarter of 2014. While there were several company acquisitions in the recent months, the loss was largely attributed to the Fire Phone. Fire Phone is a smartphone which was set to compete with Apple’s iPhone. Critics said that Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos failed on his ambition of creating the next best smartphone in the mobile computing market. Proving that was the big revenue loss that brought big dissatisfaction among Amazon’s shareholders.
For Jeff Bezos, the move was about encouraging more "bold bets" and embracing failure inside the company in pursuit of big success. Fire phone got criticized due to major functionality issues including poor Wi-Fi connectivity, SIM incompatibility, phone overheating, crashing and freezing, and lack of useful contents. To stop the bleeding, the smartphone was sold at a very outrageous value of $0.99 (originally priced at $199). This not only created controversial headlines. It also put Jeff Bezos under fire.
Obviously, it was a big loss for Amazon. Amazon, however, did the necessary fixes.
Amazon.com and you’re done – Why? How?
But that’s part of business. I like Jeff Bezos for being audacious not only in taking big risks but also in continuously innovating. He knows what he’s doing being the CEO of Amazon. In fact, a recent report from TechCrunch says that Amazon is now mostly back on track, with 14.6% year-over-year increase in revenue, despite 11.8% decline on earnings. Jeff really knows what he’s doing for Amazon. He never looses his focus.
There are many products where Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team made bold and bigger moves. Recently, I wrote a blog about this Amazon latest program - Selling Services on Amazon. This was a big move by Amazon for connecting shoppers and service providers in its ecommerce site. Another interesting service from Amazon is its Appstore. It makes selling apps easy and fast for developers.
The way I see it, innovation never stops at Amazon. What Jeff Bezos did brought big impacts on how people work inside this giant company. Amazon latest products and services were packaged by people with technical expertise, passion for innovation, and bold mindset. Just like what they are saying - Amazon.com and you’re done.
