<story><title>Launching the Kindle Fire was a mistake</title><url>https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFnKynKf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tghw</author><text>Many of his main points are vacuous at best. &quot;Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left.&quot; Since when is a function being simple a problem? And he&apos;s comparing it to a Windows phone, where the entire interface is based on &quot;mono-color&quot; tiles.&lt;p&gt;The Fire is a $200 tablet, and aside from a misplaced On/Off button (not sure how that got passed QA), the hardware you get for $200 is incredible. The software could use some work, there&apos;s no doubt about that. But here&apos;s the thing:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;They can improve the software.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t love my Fire, but you can hardly say it is &quot;downright terrible&quot;, especially when you consider the price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phillco</author><text>&amp;#62; &lt;i&gt;They can improve the software.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;But not their first impressions.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve heard this argument before (hell, even &lt;i&gt;The Lean Startup&lt;/i&gt; advocates shipping a broken, backwards v1.0), but it&apos;s usually paired with meekness: grow slowly, so that by the time you reach a wide audience your quality is awesome and nobody&apos;s the wiser. Instead, Amazon&apos;s pushing the Fire 1.0 with everything they&apos;ve got.&lt;p&gt;Shame, because Amazon probably could have pulled off the meekness strategy really well, too -- launch the Fire in December 2011 to a small number of hand-picked (Prime?) beta users, iterate, and launch the real thing in 2012.</text></comment>
<story><title>Launching the Kindle Fire was a mistake</title><url>https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFnKynKf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tghw</author><text>Many of his main points are vacuous at best. &quot;Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left.&quot; Since when is a function being simple a problem? And he&apos;s comparing it to a Windows phone, where the entire interface is based on &quot;mono-color&quot; tiles.&lt;p&gt;The Fire is a $200 tablet, and aside from a misplaced On/Off button (not sure how that got passed QA), the hardware you get for $200 is incredible. The software could use some work, there&apos;s no doubt about that. But here&apos;s the thing:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;They can improve the software.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t love my Fire, but you can hardly say it is &quot;downright terrible&quot;, especially when you consider the price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmanji</author><text>I&apos;m not going to purchase a device because the software &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; improve in the future. I&apos;m going to purchase a device that has functional software from day 1. Otherwise every day that I have to use the terrible software until it is improved is another cost that I have to pay.</text></comment>