Amazon announced their new tablet product today, the Kindle Fire. In my last post, I outlined how I thought Amazon was going to “pull an Apple“. Today, I’m feeling even more confident in that assertion, but not in the way I thought I would. Initially I thought that the Kindle Fire would be a direct strike at the iPad. I don’t get that feeling from the product Amazon launched today.
Apple has more media savvy than many of their hardware competitors like Samsung and HTC. Neither of these competitors have meaningful media marketplaces in consumers’ hands. Apple has the iTMS, iBooks, and App Store, which cumulatively offer consumers access to a wide variety of content. Interestingly, some media bleeds over to and from places you wouldn’t expect it. For example, I get my magazine subscriptions through Zinio, which is downloaded through the App Store, and in turn, my content is downloaded in-app. I expected magazines to be available through iBooks, and speculation on the internet makes it seem that others do too. To further complicate matters, some magazines are available as an “app” in the App Store.
If I knew nothing about Apple’s distribution channels, that discovery would require a not-insignificant amount of exploration. Yet thus far, Apple has actually lead the pack in terms of application quality and discoverability. I attribute much of the iPad’s success to its simplicity and the draw of its many apps.
Step back and look at Amazon’s offering. Simplicity is taken to the next level. All content comes from Amazon and is logically categorized. Movies, TV shows, magazines, books; they’re all right where you’d expect them. There’s no interstitial abstraction of a store, with the exception of apps. Even there, the naming is about as straight forward as you can get. Content is front and center on the Kindle Fire.
So how exactly is this different than the “Apple” maneuver I thought they were going to pull. When you compare the Kindle Fire to the iPad… Well, you can’t. The Kindle Fire isn’t an iPad. It doesn’t try to be. With the iPad, you’re aware of the platform you’re using. There are elements that make you aware that you’re using an Apple iOS device. All iOS devices come with a suite of apps for general productivity. Compared to the Kindle Fire, the iPad is a generalist device. The Kindle Fire is laser focused on consumers that want a device to access content. Amazon has commoditized the platform. They don’t call this device an Android tablet, because they don’t want people thinking about the OS. They want them focused on the 18 million (HELLO!) pieces of content they have access to.
Some of you are screaming at your computer right now, because when the iPad initially launched, geeks everywhere cried out in desperation over the fact that it wasn’t able to run desktop applications like Photoshop and their favorite code editor. The Kindle Fire takes this focus one step further, and you can expect every geek who is just now adjusting to the iPad to scream about what’s lacking in the Kindle Fire. The iPad has taught us that sometimes it’s a worthwhile exercise to ignore the “experts” and see what the consumer has to say.
I don’t know if the Kindle Fire will match the iPad in sales numbers. I don’t even know that it will work well. The hardware could be a let down, resulting in a laggy, uncomfortable user experience. What I do know is that Amazon just pulled an Apple. Rather than go after an existing market, they just created their own.