La vera storia dietro lo smartphone di Amazon

Il Fire Phone è stato un flop: per la prima volta Amazon non ha creato un prodotto competitivo nel prezzo, ma ha tradito la propria natura progettando uno smartphone che andasse più in competizione con l’iPhone che con la fascia bassa, economica e conveniente, del mercato. Di come è nato, soprattutto per volontà di Jeff Bezos, ne ha scritto Austin Carr su Fast Company. È anche stato un tentativo di riposizionare Amazon: da qualcosa di conveniente e necessario a un brand percepito come “cool”, quale Apple:

Bezos had profound reasons for preferring a top-of-the-line smartphone. Multiple sources indicate that the premium phone represented a “repositioning of the brand away from being so utilitarian and toward becoming more of a lifestyle brand like Apple”. Bezos expressed some of these sentiments himself in a memo he wrote years ago, entitled “Amazon.love.” In the memo, first revealed by journalist Brad Stone in , Bezos describes his vision to transform Amazon into a brand such as Apple, Nike, or Disney, which are “widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool.” Brands like Walmart and Microsoft, he noted, are “unloved” and suffer as a result. He then listed the attributes that distinguished each set of companies: “Risk taking is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Close-following is not cool.”

Nel tentativo di creare un prodotto che stupisse — innovativo, non una copia economica dell’iPhone ma una alternativa in competizione con lo stesso — hanno aggiunto funzioni che persino il team di sviluppo ha ritenuto inutili, durante la progettazione. Dynamic Perspective (l’effetto 3D) è una di queste:

And team members simply could not imagine truly useful applications for Dynamic Perspective. As far as anyone could tell, Bezos was in search of the Fire Phone’s version of Siri, a signature feature that could make the device a blockbuster. But what was the point, they wondered, beyond some fun gaming interactions and flashy 3-D lock screens. “In meetings, all Jeff talked about was, ‘3-D, 3-D, 3-D!’ He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why,” recalls a former engineering head who worked solely on Dynamic Perspective for years. “We poured surreal amounts of money into it, yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.’ No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one.”