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
