Amazon App Idea Puts Final Nail In Its Own Kindle Coffin
by Steve on 01/21/10 at 10:21 am
It has been announced that Amazon is apparently planning to bring apps to its Kindle ereader. I am not sure they could have made a more miscalculated move.
The Kindle is not a computer. Further, Amazon in a position to compete with the computer companies of the world. Nor should they need to. The kindle actually has some strong attributes that make it unique and would allow it to effectively hold off many would be competitors.
The Amazon Kindle ereader is the leader in a very narrowly-focussed product category. This is the envy, and should be the goal, of any consumer product company. To enter the computer hardware market, which is really what they are trying to do, blurs the identify of the product (not to mention the company as a whole) in the consumer’s mind. Further, it keeps the company from focussing squarely on the market lead they have generated with the ereader.
If the Kindle is the market leader in its category of ereaders, why broaden the focus into another category, unless it can be the leader in that category? With their existing product, Amazon had the opportunity to compete with tablet computers for electronic book-reading consumers, based on their core strengths: providing an economical portable devise for users to read books electronically. The Amazon Kindle is clearly the leader here.
Tablet computers may compete with the ereader market, but, I suspect there will still be a market for an inexpensive ereader. In their segment of the market, Amazon may have been under some threat. But, if they do not believe in their narrow product category, they should abandon the product line all together, rather than embarrass themselves with a poor management strategy that is boomed to failure.
