The Fire Phone was a project that Jeff Bezos believed in very strongly. Jeff Bezos wanted to take advantage of the booming smartphone industry.
Launched in July 2014, the Fire Phone finally became the biggest failure in the history of Amazon and Jeff Bezos. A failure at over $170 million!
The reasons for the failure of the Fire Phone are multiple. The first one is obviously the initial selling price. The Fire Phone was sold as expensive as an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy S series.
The Fire Phone did not bring anything additional compared to the competitors who dominated the market. The app store was not complete enough compared to the Google Play Store.
Finally, the forked version of Android used in the Fire Phone was already well behind the version of Android used in other top Android devices. So customers did not subscribe to this Fire Phone.
What is the strongest in my opinion is that Jeff Bezos and Amazon were able to turn this major failure into a phenomenal multi-billion dollar success. Indeed, the speech recognition software in the Fire Phone gave Jeff Bezos the idea to launch a totally innovative device capable of responding to user commands.
That device was the Amazon Echo.
Launched at the end of 2014, it gave birth to the industry of connected speakers of which Amazon is the leader today in front of Google. Amazon has sold more than 150 million Echo devices since then.
This shows that an entrepreneur never fails. He learns from his mistakes every time. If he knows how to adapt to analyze the reasons for his failures, he can do better and then experience great success.
