Quote:
Originally Posted by David Munch
I guess that AT&T payed some money to get exclusive sales, and Amazon anticipated that their fans would do anything to get the phone.. But I think the biggest problem is that they seem to have produced piles and piles of these phones, without being able to sell them.
|
Unless their intent was always to sell a lot of them for cheap the first time around. Make them so expensive that they are unattractive, then dump them out at a slight loss. Google's Nexus devices used to be cheap, but still relatively powerful. This year they went relatively expensive. Amazon might just do it the other way around - start out expensive and powerful and adjust over time to slightly less powerful and a lot cheaper. It is no coincidence that the Fire phone sale happened during the busiest shopping season. Amazon did not just realize - oh crap, our warehouses are still full of phones, let's sell them now - no they planned to sell them out right then and there. How much missed sales did that cost the competitors? And how much money did they lose compared to Amazon reducing their losses? One lost iphone sale is more expensive to Apple than
Amazon giving away a Fire phone for free.