On Amazon Fire
Amazon's Jeff Bezos unveiled the new breed of Kindle e-readers and their new flagship consumption device, the Kindle Fire tablet. Prior to the announcement most folks posited that Amazon was the one company that could challenge Apple's dominance in the space.
Amazon is the king of the content game. They are also the largest e-tailer and their brand is stronger than most. They have a bazillion loyal customers. It doesn't take much to come to that conclusion.
And so, everyone was seemingly correct to assume this would be the case. The Fire, specifically, has been met with overwhelming praise and even lust by the majority of press and people at large.
Amazon didn't jump into the me-too game, like others always do, usually attempting to emulate Apple's strategy(failing miserably has been a common conclusion).
Amazon plays on its strengths. They are practically unchallenged in the content space. They have the largest library of digital books(by far), millions of movies available for instant access, music from their 'MP3 store'(I really don't like that name), they even have Android apps on their very own app store(Google execs are not happy). They also have 'infinite' compute and storage capacity (AWS) that they put to a great use with the Fire. What do others, other than Apple, have to offer? They _still_ believe (or perhaps, hope) they can provide viable alternatives to the iPad by winning in the hardware specs battle. It was naive years ago, its even more naive nowadays. Its all about the experience, the content, and the apps.
We should all be pleased that Amazon delivered. Competition drives evolution. Apple needs it. The Fire will be the ideal tablet for many. To me, the Kindle (either model) is the perfect gift to give out to friends and family.
It will be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft will react to that. Microsoft may have lost the tablet war before it even had a chance to compete - their OS and the hardware that runs it will not be out for a long while. By then, the iPad and Amazon's Fire will be so far ahead, Microsoft will have no chance. Slick as Metro may be, that along won't be enough to make the difference. And then there is Google, their Motorola business, the many different OEMs that build Android phones and tablets where you can't tell one from the other. Maybe Google did do the right thing with Motorola. Maybe they didn't just buy the company just for their patent portfolio. Maybe they figured out that they need to control not just the OS and core applications stack, but so much more, to compete with Apple(and now, Amazon).
Exciting times.
Friday, 30 September 2011 11:35 pm
On digital distribution
The enemy of free is indeed 'easy'. This is more of the case when you grow up and, when time is more important than money and getting frustrated about getting something to work or trying to spin in ways it is not meant to spun is just plain not worth it.
Amazon unveiled its Mac applications store. I was expecting them to further expand their digital downloads services with a Windows centric marketplace(higher demand, no competition) but maybe this will be their next step. Amazon is apparently run by very smart people - some of those probably looked at the numbers on their Kindle business (they recently acknowledged Kindle ebooks sales surpassed the physical books) and, of course, the success of the Apple operated app stores as well as game download services (Steam mostly, for it owns 70% of that market space).
You didn't have to be able to see far into the future to accept the rise (and eventual dominance) of the new digital distribution service. Besides, there was a precedent there already; music sales shifted from physical to digital(iTunes Store, music subscription services, ..). Multimedia content(books, magazines) and software (applications, games) will undoubtedly continue be available in physical form for sometime to come, but eventually they will become either hard to come by or expensive to own and maintain(the vinyl analogy).
I have stopped buying physical copies of books, games and software(disks) for some time now, save for video games for my game consoles - although the vendors there are aggressively expanding their online offerings, making it possible to download and buy full games. It is widely expected their forthcoming iterations will be optimized for offering access and delivery to full games directly from the 'Cloud'. Even if I don't get to play a game I just bought (which is subject to automatic updates, is available for re-download whenever I need it), I may decide to do so in a year or two - it will be there waiting for me, no need to track it down or worry about misplacing the disk. Same is true for books and magazines( plus, I can pick up a book right where I stopped reading on another device than the one I was reading it before).
Sometimes resistance is futile and pointless.
- An introduction to AMIGA Programming using C: I have the fondest of memories learning how to build applications using intuition, graphics, dos and ClassAct (back off MUI folks) libraries. "Use the blitter, Luke"
Thursday, 26 May 2011 10:30 pm
New Theme, iPhone, Google AppEngine
My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.
I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.
"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.
Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.
I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008 10:08 pm
