Wow. Bezos came out swinging yesterday after launching a whole new line-up for the Kindles. The Fire is their new multi-color mini iPad tablet set out to compete against Apple. I’ll fully disclose I’m an Apple fanboy. I have an old G4 turned office server, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air (hers), two iPhone 4′s, one iPhone 3G a friend just returned, an iPod touch, two Apple TVs, an iPad…you get the point. With all this I still love a good fight.
I love the letter from Bezos posted on Amazon.com’s homepage. It starts off with ‘There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.’ BOOM. Well played Jeff, well played. Clearly he’s ready to roll up his sleeves and get in the trenches with Apple.
As much as I love Apple, I’m also a Seattle fanatic and love seeing Amazon crush it (it behoves Seattle to root for Amazon). If anyone has a shot at taking a bite from Apple’s large tablet market share, Amazon has the content to back their device. The main problem with the Playbook and TouchPad is content. There were no Apps and little to do. The Kindle has always sold well for the serious reader (hence why I don’t own one, lol).
Amazon also has one of the fastest growing web service businesses around with their EC2 cloud service. Ask any developer about it and if they know anything they’ll tell you about elastic load balancing and the ability to solve problems by remapping your elastic IP address to a replacement instance <—sorry about the nerd lingo. Bottom line is its legit.
The best was Jeff’s quote at the end of his letter ‘We are building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices.’ Ouch. Apple may not have to play ball with Amazon on the price war but you can bet Amazon will be #2 in the tablet market faster than you can say iPad 3.
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