Posts tagged amazon
The Difference Between Amazon and Apple
Let the Kindle Fire reviews wash over you and you’ll notice a theme: the price is mentioned early and often. The price is employed as a caveat for both detractions and compliments.
Reading these reviews has helped me realize, or at least find the words to describe, the fundamental difference between Amazon and Apple. The two companies can be summed up simply:
- Amazon creates great deals.
- Apple creates great experiences.
That’s it. Neither is better, just different.
This macro distinction is what matters most when users (or investors) consider long-term relationships with either technology ecosystem. Because technology companies don’t simply sell discrete products these days. They sell services or, more accurately, relationships: long-term partnerships with transition costs and dependencies.
Just making the linguistic shift from “product” to “relationship” should force most to adjust their evaluation criteria wildly.
I’m still trying to figure out similarly simple lines for Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Microsoft traded the “create” verb for “improve” a long time ago, which requires dominance to be sustainable.
Does my struggle indicate each company’s lack of focus or am I missing something?
![The Idea of a Computer is Diffusing
In the future we won’t buy computers, just interfaces.
While ripping apart Apple’s new Thunderbold Display, the iFixit team was greeted with more components than they expected. Reacting to the discovery, Chris Foresman of Ars Technica quipped, “what they found inside is basically a 27” iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.”
Because it incorporates the PCI express protocol and sports torrential speeds, Thunderbolt is already starting to externalize various parts of your computer. Apple’s Display sports ethernet, USB, and Firewire chipsets. Two of these previously standard interfaces don’t exist in the MacBook Air. You could say the svelte laptop outsourced them to the monitor.
Clear candidates for motherboard expatriation dot the rest of Apple’s lineup. In the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros there exists an additional discrete, power-hungry graphics card for use in desktop situations. In light of iFixit’s find, these components make more sense inside the monitor than inside the computer.
Now consider Amazon’s big announcement today. Amazon has stripped each Kindle of every component they can possibly put in their cloud. Storage is an S3 bucket and processing has started to shift to EC2. Doing this helps them keep their costs ridiculously low and speed up performance for the user. Appropriately, Bezos “portrays [the] Kindle Fire as a service,” according to Bloomberg. Certainly Bezos is referring to the media consumption aspect of the Fire, but it’s an interesting descriptor for the device… I mean, “service.”
As our computers diffuse both locally (in the case of Thunderbolt, which spreads several components across your desk) and afar (in the case of the Fire, which ports components to the cloud) the language we use to talk about technology is going to change. Or at least the way we’ll encounter them. Devices will become services. We’ll buy interfaces, not computers, and hard disks will be treated as caches.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls953b7Iao1qz95glo1_1280.jpg)
The Idea of a Computer is Diffusing
In the future we won’t buy computers, just interfaces.
While ripping apart Apple’s new Thunderbold Display, the iFixit team was greeted with more components than they expected. Reacting to the discovery, Chris Foresman of Ars Technica quipped, “what they found inside is basically a 27” iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.”
Because it incorporates the PCI express protocol and sports torrential speeds, Thunderbolt is already starting to externalize various parts of your computer. Apple’s Display sports ethernet, USB, and Firewire chipsets. Two of these previously standard interfaces don’t exist in the MacBook Air. You could say the svelte laptop outsourced them to the monitor.
Clear candidates for motherboard expatriation dot the rest of Apple’s lineup. In the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros there exists an additional discrete, power-hungry graphics card for use in desktop situations. In light of iFixit’s find, these components make more sense inside the monitor than inside the computer.
Now consider Amazon’s big announcement today. Amazon has stripped each Kindle of every component they can possibly put in their cloud. Storage is an S3 bucket and processing has started to shift to EC2. Doing this helps them keep their costs ridiculously low and speed up performance for the user. Appropriately, Bezos “portrays [the] Kindle Fire as a service,” according to Bloomberg. Certainly Bezos is referring to the media consumption aspect of the Fire, but it’s an interesting descriptor for the device… I mean, “service.”
As our computers diffuse both locally (in the case of Thunderbolt, which spreads several components across your desk) and afar (in the case of the Fire, which ports components to the cloud) the language we use to talk about technology is going to change. Or at least the way we’ll encounter them. Devices will become services. We’ll buy interfaces, not computers, and hard disks will be treated as caches.
“ What a day for Android. It was just pushed behind the scenes as the thing that powers that awesome, cheap Amazon Kindle tablet. And made into that thing you pay Microsoft to use.”
Couple this with the earlier news that 2/3rd’s of Google’s mobile search is from iOS devices and we have quite a tangled web.
Amazon Launches 70% Kindle Royalty Option
Under this option, Amazon will pay authors and publishers a royalty of 70% of the list price of Kindle books, which is a far higher per-copy royalty than most authors receive on physical book sales (including the standard Kindle book royalties).
2010 Predictions: Amazon will be at Apple’s Jan 26th Event
I can’t think of any other reason why they haven’t released Kindle for Mac yet. Especially when they already have the Objective-C backend running on the iPhone.
Plus, their initial screenshots would look great on a tablet.
CES Winners: Great Partners
The first week back from winter break is always hard. Not only do I need to catch up with accrued email, but the tech world is in overdrive due to CES. It’s a perfect storm of sorts.
Now that the big announcements are out we’re starting to see some themes solidify. Ebooks. Application platforms. 3D. Mobile. But what companies are winning? Right now it looks to be the people behind the scenes, the quieter players who assist and enhance the loud ones. Companies that are great partners are building their positions behind the scenes. They embrace many opportunities to work with others and strive to make their products play nicely with all.
Here’s my list of winners so far:
- HTC: HTC is one of the best partners in the industry. They stuck with Windows Mobile longer than anyone else, even taking it upon themselves to design a better interface for it. With Google, they’ve become nearly synonymous with Android. But even with that direct line to the
smartsuperphone market, they’re building fantastic devices for BREW, bringing their magic to budget phones. Did I mention they play nice with carriers too? It looks like they’ve got featured phones on each of the big 4 this year, a feat which is only matched by RIM. 2010 is HTC’s year. Just watch: they’re going to be the Dell or HP of the mobile generation. - Amazon: HP and Microsoft’s tablet announcement was met with crickets, but buried in the details was a key fact: the integrated reader in the Windows 7 device was Amazon’s own. So if Apple tablet rumors have lit fires under all PC makers that run Windows 7, Amazon stands to expand it’s Kindle Platform market share to a big chunk of the market. The ereader space tilts even more in Amazon’s favor if they lock down the tablet marketplace. Who cares if Amazon’s tablet/ereader is black and white only? Let the OEM’s incorporate their software on their own.
- Netflix: Netflix Streaming continues its march across your future entertainment center. This CES they announced streaming deals on bluray players and TVs made by Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, and Funai. Last year they announced a partnership with Vizio, and I’m pretty sure they have one in place with Sony. Last time I was at Costco, 4 out of the 5 bluray players had Netflix inside.
- XBox: While not really a company, this product seems to be hitting all the right notes in a very un-Microsoft way. Full media box, check. Netflix on board, check. Set-top box replacement, on the way. Kick-ass community that’s owning the competition, check. Social network integration, check. Hell, a full third of time spend using the XBox is spend doing non-gaming things.
An Amazon fulfillment warehouse in the UK.
Digital doesn’t eliminate the physical, it just moves it elsewhere. (Via Mail Online)
