"Their Firephone is so terrible they literally can’t give it away"
Okay, fair enough -- it was a disastrous product.
"and the existence of the Amazon Echo strains all reason."
Wait, what? How do you extend your hatred for typesetting and buttons on the Kindle to a product that has neither? At this point, you are just being presumptuous.
> How do you extend your hatred for typesetting and buttons on the Kindle to a product that has neither?
I'm not sure if that's why the author added it, but I really wish Amazon would first fix a bit more low-hanging fruit for its most beloved hardware product, instead of sinking time and money into unrelated crap.
It always feels good when you pay for something and you can feel that the money goes into making it even better (software updates, next hardware iteration...).
>but I really wish Amazon would first fix a bit more low-hanging fruit for its most beloved hardware product, instead of sinking time and money into unrelated crap
It'd be very surprising to me if the resources put into the Echo had any impact whatsoever on the amount of resources put into the Kindle team.
I hear this argument a lot - "Why does company X work on feature Y when feature Z isn't complete", when features Y and Z are handled by completely different teams with their own dedicated resources.
People can be moved from team to team, and the Echo and the Fire gadgets need hardware and software engineers just like the Kindle does. Given how little the Kindle software evolves, it's hard to say whether it even has a proper team.
Amazon is famous for taking all profits from one product, and investing them into other (new) products. This is precisely what annoys me here :|
