Internal failures and “2 pizza” teams: Amazon’s take on innovation

REMEMBER when Amazon tried to launch a smartphone? While it has been 8 years since, the fact that customers experienced the flop stuck in the mind of Paul Misener, the company’s vice-president for global innovation policy and communications.

“We discontinued the phone product after only about 8 months and we ended up taking a financial writedown of US$170 million. But it wasn’t the money that was painful, it wasn’t the failure that was painful – it was the fact that the failure got out to customers. That shouldn’t have happened,” he recalled in an interview with The Business Times.

Called the Fire Phone, the product was criticised for its limited selection of apps on its app store, numbering around 200,000, instead of the near-million apps on iOS and Android phones. Other complaints included the price point and unexciting 3D display.