Google wants to know everything about everyone in the world. Amazon wants to sell stuff to every one of those people.
When Amazon stormed the market with their Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, many were highly impressed that the tablets were so good for the price. Of course, these tablets are very good value with very good quality screens, but they serve a dual purpose: To provide a retail outlet for Amazon's ever growing range of digital products.
Buy an Amazon Fire tablet, and you discover that you haven't bought an Android tablet at all; you've bought a portal into Amazon's catalogue of music, books and films.
Not that there's anything wrong with this.
If you don't mind stumping up £79 a year for a range of Amazon's services and products, then owning a Fire tablet used to be one of the few ways in which you could watch their TV programmes and films.
Thankfully Amazon have added a few more "perks" to their Amazon Prime £79/year services such as Prime Music and Prime Instant Video, which you can now watch on any Android tablet.
So Amazon created a range of great Fire tablets to market their products. These tablets have been available at reasonable prices, and their frequent special offers have helped to drive sales.
So, who would have thought that Amazon's Fire Phone would have been such a massive disaster?
By all means, please read Techradar's less than positive review at the link above, but in a nutshell the Amazon Fire Phone failed due to it's massive price on release, and it was only available on the O2 network at first - What was Amazon thinking? It's not the iPhone!
The reviews were all unfavourable, too, with the unintuitive interface and fancy face tracking cameras leading to all sorts of problems for users. Add to that the specifications, which were days away from being outdated by the next big smartphone release. On top of all of these problems, it wasn't even an Android phone, and it was even more of a Amazon salesman than the Fire tablets.
The price quickly fell, but this still couldn't attract customers.
Within the last month, I've seen the (unlocked) Amazon Fire Phone on sale through Amazon for £99, and I still wouldn't buy it at that price. For what it actually does, I'd still not be tempted if it was £50.
The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece about Amazon laying off dozens of employees from their research and development "Lab126".
There are reportedly other products still in development, though these could also be shelved as the company looks to concentrate on their existing best sellers such as the Kindle Fire tablet range.
According to ARS Technica, Amazon are still sitting on a big pile (a £54M pile!) of unsold Fire Phones - They will take some shifting.
The thing is, did anyone want an Amazon Fire Phone anyway? The tablets sold well because of the price, quality and the fact that they were bought as media viewers.
The tablet market is vastly different to the smartphone market, even though in theory they perform very similar functions - A family will buy one or more tablets for viewing media on, but smartphones tend to be something that customers want (or are forced) to continually upgrade.
Tablets on the other hand last for years, or until they get sat on - or your toddler spills the drink from their Tommee Tippee cup all over it.
Less than five years ago, consumers still wanted a "Facebook Phone", and former hotshot Android phone manufacturing luvvie HTC obliged by releasing the HTC First, aka the Facebook Phone in 2013.
This smartphone was an absolute disaster, even though HTC had already tried to market two "Facebook Phones" two years earlier in 2011; the HTC ChaCha (nicknamed the HTC "ChavChav") with a physical keyboard, and the HTC Salsa.
Back in 2011, both of these smartphones were pretty good and HTC was still a well respected brand, but even though people actually wanted a Facebook Phone, it appeared that HTC had chosen to try to sell something that it thought that people would snap up - Much like Amazon thinking that a Fire Phone would sell as well as their tablets.
Amazon, if only your Fire Phone had originally retailed at the current £99 that it is now, you would have had something that people would have bought and maybe progressed on to buying a bigger phone in the future - much like your Kindle Fire tablets.
Amazon missed a big trick right at the start with their over-pricing: The tech media had speculated for months that the Amazon Fire Phone might even be free, due to the tie-ins to the Amazon ecosystem. When it arrived with its original £399 price tag for the entry level 32GB model, its nauseating face tracking software and its blatant, built-in Amazon tie-ins, it's no wonder why this smartphone crashed and burned, and still burns to this day.
