Amazon Kindle Fire makes a 2 horse race
The announcement of the Amazon Kindle Fire has the press abuzz discussing the future of the tablet market. Some have stepped off into some alternate reality stating the Kindle Fire will kill off the iPad (insane notion)!
While most point out quite correctly that the bell is tolling for all the other tablet makers, who are now bracketed on the high end by the iPad and the low end (of the price scale) by the Kindle Fire.
In my opinion the Kindle Fire and iPad will both prosper, and it has little to do with the feature set of each offering. It has everything to do with the companies behind the tablets, and the ecosystem of content they deliver.
I have long maintained that Steve Jobs biggest success story when the book is written will be iTunes, and it is iTunes that makes the iPad such a tour de force. The wealth of content, easy delivery system, trusted payment model and open ended nature (easy to expand) have made it the cornerstone of Apple’s growth.
Amazon took the exact same path, from a completely different direction, they first built the content, in the Amazon online store, and now are adding the hardware to leverage that content (Kindle and now Kindle Fire)
The main reason no other tablet is going to rise to significance is no other company can offer the content. It is as simple as that.
The fact that Jeff Bezos would launch his much anticipated tablet without about half the features of the dominant iPad, or even many of the Android competitors tells the tale. The Kindle Fire has no camera, no Bluetooth, no 3g, no gps. no chance? It is what it has that tells the tale. It has access to Amazon’s huge media library, books, movies music, to their new app store and perhaps most importantly a proprietary browser (Silk), which will allow Amazon to assure their users have a good online experience.
The bottom line is both Apple’s iPad and the Kindle Fire are just containers to pour content into, and both Apple and Amazon make money from the majority of the content you access on their devices. So Samsung, ASUS, Toshiba and all the other tablet wannabes had better have a huge re-think on how they are going to thrive if not survive in the the Amazon/Apple Tablet world.
