Tag: amazon

Amazon’s tortoise to everyone else’s hare

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Venkatesh Rao: Unlike the other big companies that symbolize our times — Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft — Amazon did not rise to power by inventing a new product or service. It came to power by systematically taking down an entire existing industry. It is a story that called for strategic depth, not technical wizardry, design brilliance or sheer energy.  In the technology world, nobody holds up Amazon engineers as extraordinary geniuses or its designers as Da Vincis. They are good, but not great. Yet, time and again, Amazon wins.

Marco Arment: The Kindle Fire isn’t fun

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 I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative, but I can’t call it delightful, fun, or pleasant to use. Quite the opposite, actually: using the Fire is frustrating and unpleasant, and it feels like work. Here’s the question, with the millions of pre-orders out there, the “platform” getting hyped up in the media to create a “head to head” story against the iPad, and the fuzzy feelgood early open source… does it matter how the Kindle Fire feels to the users?

Straight out the Apple playbook, Amazon spend on the Kindle supply chain

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Of course Amazon is going to have less free cash this quarter. The point of having buckets of cash is so you can buy in bulk, and get a discount. And the Kindle Fire needs a lot of bulk buying (back of the envelope calculations, at least $175 million, maybe nearer $200 million given the growth in gross sales). But that bulk buy will drop costs along the board, and while the Kindle Fire tablet may be sold at cost, the long term profit from giving everyone a personalised storefront, is going to far outweigh a small profit drop. Quite frankly,

A public distro of Amazon’s Android flavour could be very disruptive

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Kevin Marks, re-iterating that Android is not just Google Android: Why would Amazon do this [The Amazon Android tablet]? Because they are primarily in the shopping and media business. Apple has stopped them selling eBooks and media inside their apps on iPad/iPhone; Google has banned their App Store from the Google Android Market. Amazon could even offer a referral fee for anything bought via their store as an incentive for device manufacturers to ship it.

Hobson’s choice for Amazon’s Android Tablet

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If Amazon want a successful Android tablet with a volume of sales to make them a player in the tablet space, they’re going to need to price it incredibly competitively, not as low as the Touchpad clearance, but around the $200-$300 mark. Which means that they’ll be reliant on making up that difference on the other side, through App Stores, music sales, Kindle downloads and other incidentals (the so-called Nintendo method). But if the tablet priced is priced that competitively, my suspicion is that any “Amazon branding” and lock-in to their stores and revenue streams will be rooted away in a matter