Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has said the online retail giant will continue making new smartphones, despite the company booking $US170 million ($204 million) in writedowns on its Fire Phone.
According to ReCode, Bezos said: “I have made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com … literally. You might remember Pets.com or Kozmo.”
“None of those things are fun. They also don’t matter. Companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, eventually get [desperate and] make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.”
In June, Amazon announced the release of the Fire Phone, with key features including Dynamic Perspective (a 3D spatial-awareness feature) and Firefly image recognition.
The release followed years of rumours the company’s Lab 126 R&D facility working on a smartphone, with the company hinting at the release before its release with claims its app store delivered the best developer returns in the industry.
While the device ran a modified version of Android, it used Amazon’s own Kindle App store rather than Google Play and did not have access to Google’s smartphone apps, leading to poor sales.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
