This has classic Amazon politics written all over it. I'm pretty far removed from anything Kindle/Fire related, but this was my best guess at what happened based off of the Amazon I know:
Jeff said make a phone (probably like 5 years ago). They pulled orgs apart and mashed them into this superorg with several VPs and dozens of Directors, with the software teams in Seattle but the hardware folks in a completely different city, and then told them to work it out. In the course of working it out, the hundreds of cooks elbowing each other in the overcrowded kitchen resulted in delay after delay, with the final feature set being a mashup of 40 different director's flagship bullshit-o-tron that they expect to be promoted for (OMG...everybody is gonna think useless 3D stuff that kills the battery is so coool...I can't wait to be reporting directly to Jeff!!!). Come crunch time, the product managers all schedule their SDEs to show up to a 2 hour meeting so they can discuss the same exact plan to ship on time that they discussed yesterday for 2 hours.
Now that it is a dud, nobody wants to touch it, so all the Directors/VPs migrate laterally to different orgs (or quit) and then rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the bug list grows bigger by the day, a handful of software engineers go crazypants optimization on a non-bottleneck feature, and all the sane people just hope for a day where we can forget about it all and focus on some other new whizburger.
Sounds about right. There's only room for one iconoclast at Amazon: anyone showing resistance to the crazy ideas Jeff came up with would be shown the door. You just don't understand, man: Jeff has a ...vision... and he's never been wrong!. It may be time for a strong board of directors who can reign in the ego a little before we get any more projects reminiscent of Lucas' later films.
My predicted scenario was off mark, based on the article, but what surprised me about it was how much Jeff acted exactly like every Director, VP, and SVP that I'm familiar with (with a handful of suggestions). Being in the supply chain, I've seen Jeff exactly zero times in the entire time I've been here (we're not exactly the flashiest part of the company). But you could have taken almost every instance he was mentioned in this article, replaced his name with Jeff Wilke or Dave Clark, and it would have sounded just as correct.
The funny thing about Amazon culture compared to other corporate cultures is that there isn't much of a Negative Selection going on. You can generally be assured that a VP is going to be exceptionally capable and intelligent. The caveat is that they are also going to be a Yes Man, because their boss demands that respect, and they will require that their own direct reports be Yes Men. It is a culture with hundreds of Stalins...extremely talented technocratic leaders that are right most of the time and wrong a handful of times, but where subordinates are deathly afraid of being contrary in the instances where their boss is wrong.
Jeff said make a phone (probably like 5 years ago). They pulled orgs apart and mashed them into this superorg with several VPs and dozens of Directors, with the software teams in Seattle but the hardware folks in a completely different city, and then told them to work it out. In the course of working it out, the hundreds of cooks elbowing each other in the overcrowded kitchen resulted in delay after delay, with the final feature set being a mashup of 40 different director's flagship bullshit-o-tron that they expect to be promoted for (OMG...everybody is gonna think useless 3D stuff that kills the battery is so coool...I can't wait to be reporting directly to Jeff!!!). Come crunch time, the product managers all schedule their SDEs to show up to a 2 hour meeting so they can discuss the same exact plan to ship on time that they discussed yesterday for 2 hours.
Now that it is a dud, nobody wants to touch it, so all the Directors/VPs migrate laterally to different orgs (or quit) and then rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the bug list grows bigger by the day, a handful of software engineers go crazypants optimization on a non-bottleneck feature, and all the sane people just hope for a day where we can forget about it all and focus on some other new whizburger.