There only seems to be glowing reviews of the Kindle Fire so far (which in itself seems like a good reason to doubt its success, but I’m not going to). I’m not going to heap praise on the product, though I too am very interested in getting one for the holidays. At $199, it’s a low risk proposition, unlike an iPad’s $499+ which is a commitment. But what really impresses me, is the corporate thinking that went into this – a strategy built on multiple assets over time seemingly all leading up to this moment, and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom about the tablet space.
The obvious asset they built off of was digital books, but that was an outgrowth of Amazon’s core product line and therefore not surprising. But they pursued digital music and movies even when delivery of that media was clunky. And they developed Whisper Sync to sync media across multiple devices and OS’s. And they built their own server farms to host content in the cloud.
But I also really appreciate their willingness to re-imagine the tablet experience, starting with Silk, their browser. The notion that delivery of web pages can be better distributed between client and server is great outside the box thinking, and doesn’t take the user experience for granted as other phone and tablet browsers do. They also put user experience first when they decided that they’d create their own UI, and not rely on Android’s. And they’ll review and approve apps that you can load onto the Fire, not taking any and all Android apps. They didn’t buy into the conventional wisdom that success is measured in number of apps available to download.
Their weak point from my prior experience with their music and movies was the ability to search and sort. It has been far easier to find music and movies I like on iTunes. I hope they address this in the Fire and re-imagine how I find content.
This is all in great contrast to the route that all other tablet manufacturers that followed Apple took. I recall being amazed at an ad for an HP tablet half a year ago that primarily featured the specs like a PC ad – ports, amount of memory, processor speed. Or the approach that WebOS took that was only limited to the UI and not the entire user experience.
To borrow and re-purpose a famous James Carville quote, “It’s the experience, stupid” :)
