Lab126 employs about 3,000 people, so it’s unlikely that the layoffs – reportedly the first in Lab126’s 11-year history – will ultimately represent a significant portion of its headcount. Apparently the failure of the Fire phone, which the company released past year, with much fanfare, forced Jeff Bezos to discontinue development of some consumer devices, including the phone business.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has retrenched dozens of engineers at Lab126 that worked on the Fire, and killed off or scaled back a number of other hardware projects that were under development. But expect a lot more weird, insane ideas as Amazon figures out where it fits into the hardware game, even as its employee churn skyrockets.
But that lack of focus and “shifting, and, at times, enigmatic priorities” has led to a ton of turnover at Lab126, per the report. The workplace is turbulent and the roles are ill-defined, sources added, leading some workers to find jobs at other technology companies. The device, which featured facial-recognition features that didn’t quite have any real purposes, failed to wow consumers and never sold well. This may be a good thing, because it really looks like Amazon is branching off into two many directions and none of the products are really that good. It has “images that will seem to pop out at the user without wearing special glasses”, as opposed to the Amazon Fire Phone’s pseudo 3D effect.
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The Verge reported that Amazon will stop or slow projects including a 14in tablet codenamed Project Cairo, a projector codenamed Shimmer and a “smart stylus” dubbed Nitro that converts handwriting into digital shopping lists. Within three months Amazon took a $170m charge on the device and was left with $83m in inventory, which it’s been clearing out with fire sale prices ever since.
