Austin Carr in Fast Company on turbulence at Amazon-owned Lab126, the hardware R&D firm that is behind the Kindle e-readers, Fire Phone, etc:
In other words, the re-org is not happening because of the Fire Phone flop, but in spite of it, these sources say. Bezos believes in his company’s future in consumer electronics. Amazon plans to invest $55 million in its Lab126 operations in Silicon Valley, and ramp up hiring to at least 3,757 employees by 2019, according to a recent report.
That preview and the full article have been getting lots of circulation on social media today, so you should read the whole thing, but I think I believe this paragraph to be an accurate assessment. When pressed by Henry Blodget on the failure of the Fire Phone in his Business Insider interview he said this:
What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.
As Jeff doubles down on his hardware strategy it'll be interesting to watch to see where Kindle Fire tablets and Fire Phone go. There aren't many Android manufacturers out there aside from Xiaomi that have been able to go it alone successfully without Google services (forked versions of Android don't have access to Google apps). And the Fire Phone was so awful that I feel bad for the people who got themselves locked into 2-year commitments to those things. Amazon is known not for being cool and sexy but for being ruthlessly frugal as a service to the customer, to pass on value to them in the form of savings and convenience. They might need some more cool, though, because their phones and tablets are the anti-thesis of cool.
