Linked List: January 23, 2015

Friday, 23 January 2015

Fast Company: ‘The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle and What It Means for Amazon’s Future’ 

It’s a couple of weeks old, but I just now got around to finishing Austin Carr’s detailed and incredibly well-sourced story on the making of Amazon’s Fire Phone. Scathing take on Bezos’s involvement:

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.” […]

According to three sources familiar with the company’s numbers, the Fire Phone sold just tens of thousands of units in the weeks that preceded the company’s radical price cuts. The $170 million write-down confirmed that the launch has been a dud.

I disagree with Carr’s assessment that Fire Phone was doomed from the outset because it didn’t fit within Amazon’s brand. Carr writes:

What makes the Fire Phone a particularly troubling adventure, however, is that Amazon’s CEO seemingly lost track of the essential driver of his company’s brand. It’s understandable that Bezos would want to give Amazon a premium shine, but to focus on a high-end product, instead of the kind of service that has always distinguished the company, proved misguided. “We can’t compete head to head with Apple,” says a high-level source at Lab126. “There is a branding issue: Apple is premium, while our customers want a great product at a great price.”

Brands are the result of products and services, not the other way around. The problem with the Fire Phone is that it’s a shitty phone. That’s it. If Amazon had made a phone with compelling features — an iPhone-caliber phone — it would have done just fine, and Amazon’s brand would have grown. If you set out to make a premium quality phone, you have to deliver a premium quality phone.

Can You Hear Above 16-bit/44.1kHz? 

Dave Hamilton, writing at The Mac Observer:

This difference between 16-bit/44.1kHz audio and anything greater than that has been tested (a lot… in double-blind tests) and we have yet to find any human that can reliably notice that difference. Bit depths greater than 16 bits and sample rates above 44.1kHz simply don’t matter as long as the data is converted properly (and our ability to do that conversion has improved substantially since those very first CDs were released at the dawn of the digital music era).

Sounds like snake oil.

On Apple’s Integration of TestFlight 

Supertop (developers of Castro and Unread):

In March last year, after a particularly frustrating few hours dealing with iOS beta device slots, I filed this bug report with Apple. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a solution to this problem was already in motion. In February, Apple had acquired a company called TestFlight. Over the next few months it integrated many of the original TestFlight features into iTunes Connect.

Shortly after iOS 8 was released, Apple opened this new beta testing service to iOS developers. When compared to the previous testing process, it is a major improvement and I am grateful to the team behind it. It is a sign that Apple cares about third party developers and about helping us improve the quality of the software we provide.

(Via Federico Viticci at MacStories.)

Former Microsoft Executive on HoloLens 

James Brightman interviewed former Microsoft executive Peter Molyneux — who worked on the Kinect — on HoloLens:

Molyneux commented, “The bizarre thing is a huge amount of effort and time and money goes into researching the tech, like the Kinect tech and scanning the bodies, and there’s always this one line that hardware manufacturers — whether it be Microsoft or anyone else — say and that’s ‘we can’t wait to see what happens when it gets into the hands of developers.’ Now if Apple had said that when they introduced the iPhone, I don’t think we’d ever end up with the iPhone! What really should happen is that they put a similar amount of money into researching just awesome real world applications that you’ll really use and that work robustly and smoothly and delightfully.

“They should spend as much money doing that rather than just on hardware tech and saying, ‘Okay developers, we’ll leave it to you.’ If you look at the cases where technology has worked well — touch is one of those, and Wii Sports and motion control; Nintendo didn’t introduce motion control until they had Wii Sports. You weren’t just playing a few demos. I just hope that for the Holo stuff that they really choose an application and make that sing.”