Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has described the disastrous Fire Phone launch as a ‘tiny blip’ compared to the future failures the online giant is working on now.
Speaking to the Washington Post (which he owns), Bezos claimed Amazon has much greater flops in the pipeline.
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“Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”
The Fire Phone was such a disaster for Amazon that it ended up selling the remaining stock in a fire sale and writing off a $170 million loss.
Related: 5 Amazon announcements that took us by surprise
Bezos said costly mistakes like this were necessary in order to prepare for success. He said companies need to make larger and larger failures in order to continue growing.
For Amazon of course, with its global retail empire and web server business, failure is far less costly than for most companies, who’d to survive a colossal cock-up like the Fire Phone.
He added: “You kind of have to back up because it is our job, if we want to be innovative and pioneering, to make mistakes.”
“The size of your mistakes needs to grow along with that. If it doesn’t, you’re not going to be inventing at scale that can actually move the needle. You need to be making big, noticeable failures.”
Bezos has so far lived up to his word to make Amazon’s failures more impressive.
Throughout the years, initiatives like the travel site Destinations, a Groupon rival called Local and the Yahoo Answers alternative Askville all met their doom. None of these were as calamitous as the Fire Phone though.
We’re looking forward to seeing what Bezos and crew will dump in the fail file next.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
