Amazon's Fire Phone Misfires?
Last week, Amazon unveiled the much-anticipated or at least much-hyped 3D smart phone, following up with an email to all its customers introducing the phone with the slogan "The First Smartphone Designed by Amazon". That slogan sounds a bit strange since the Amazon brand is not associated with product design excellence so "the first blah designed by Amazon" does not really carry much weight with us - Amazon did pioneer the eBook reader business with Kindle and dominates it, but that's not because of its elegant design, more because of ready availability of the content at bargain prices, which in turn is based on Amazon’s willingness to sell both the device and eBooks at a loss to gain market share. Brilliant business strategy, perhaps, but IMHO, that does not set Amazon as a product design excellence star. All that slogan does is tell us that Amazon is not too proud to be (just) a company that efficiently operates warehouses and packs & deliv...