When Jeff Bezos decided that Amazon needed to get into the smartphone game, he pulled out all the stops. And the resulting device, the Fire Phone, ended up 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 shipped in 2014 with a feature list a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were around 400 cameras! There was a whole home screen filled with something called “kidnappers!” » But the Fire Phone was primarily a way to buy things on Amazon. This was, after all, what Bezos wanted. It’s just not what users wanted.
For this episode of Version history, we tell the story of the Fire Phone from start to finish. (It doesn’t take that long.) David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O’Kane discuss how the success of the Kindle led to the expansion of Amazon’s hardware plans, the brewing fight with Apple over App Store policies, how Bezos himself shepherded the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing failed. Just a few months after its launch, the Fire Phone was available 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 really, really small. But that doesn’t make his story any less interesting.
This is the fifth episode of Version history. (We’re more than halfway through the first season!) If you want to catch up on the series, there are three good places to go:
Thanks to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show and sent in their comments! We’re already planning the next set of episodes and want to hear anything you think we should or shouldn’t do or do differently. What other huge product fails 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:
