The Amazon Fire phone is largely considered to be a flop. The device was first introduced in June and led to a $170 million write-down and a lowering of the sticker price to just 99 cents.
According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, however, the fact that the device failed is OK.
"I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com," said Bezos in an interview. "Literally billions. ... Companies that don't embrace failure and continue to experiment eventually get in the desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence."
Bezos' failed ideas include an auction website, which failed, then evolved into something called zShops, which also failed. Eventually the idea became Amazon Marketplace, which now accounts for 40 percent of Amazon's sales.
"None of those things are fun. They also don't matter," said Bezos.
Despite the failures, Bezos has certainly had his fair share of success stories.
"The Kindle Voyage [has been] completely killer. Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, we're having trouble building enough," continued Bezos. "We didn't build enough Amazon Echo, either." The Echo is the the company's intelligent voice control system and speaker.
Bezos went on to say that he doesn't believe in "me, too" products, or products that are essentially another company's idea rebranded into something that Amazon can offer. Despite this, the company has launched the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, which follow similar products from companies such as Roku and Google with the Chromecast.
Amazon posted a third-quarter operating loss of $544 million, which is the biggest ever posted for the company. When asked if Amazon could ever make money, Bezos responded that it could but that the company's strategy was to expand into new areas using its profitable areas of business to fund the expansion. The CEO also said that he had a leadership-succession plan for himself and other senior execs, but he did not mention who was next in line to take over as CEO.
As far as the Fire phone goes and the company's future plans for smartphones, Bezos says to "stay tuned" and that it may take many iterations to finally get the device right.
The company recently ended a six-month dispute with Hachette Book Group over terms for e-book and print sales. Bezos mentioned that book publishers were enjoying "unparalleled profitability" because of e-book sales and that the company is making reading books more affordable and easy through releasing devices such as the Kindle e-book reader.
