Amazon Scales Back Lab126 and Fire Phone Efforts ⇥ wsj.com

Greg Bensinger, Wall Street Journal:

In recent weeks Amazon has dismissed dozens of engineers who worked on its Fire phone at Lab126, its secretive hardware-development center in Silicon Valley, according to people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs were the first in the division’s 11-year history, these people said. But the precise toll on its roughly 3,000-person staff couldn’t be learned, in part because Amazon typically requires employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for severance payments.

The company also has scaled back or halted some of Lab126’s more ambitious projects—including a large-screen tablet—and reorganized the division, combining two hardware units there into one, people familiar with the matter said.

Any job loss is awful, and I hope these displaced workers find new employment soon. But the Fire Phone does demonstrate that Amazon’s internal culture doesn’t always produce results. Amazon is not always making the best products or services, despite the mistreatment of their staff.