Amazon's Kindle Fire

Techcrunch put it plain simple: Amazon Just Won the Android Tablet Wars With Kindle Fire

The first thing that came to my mind when asked about the new Amazon tablet was: cheap. Its bloody cheap. I haven't compared it spec by spec with other tablets (we'll get hundreds of those reviews in a couple of days all around the web) but we have reached a point where hardware is a commodity, the key features are not in the hardware spec of these kind of devices (as Apple knows very well).

Amazon is offering us a new experience. Its not a product, its an experience. Of all my MBA professors and lessons, the ones I always liked the most were the Marketing ones by Fernando Botella, and he always underlined the importance of experience vs product. Apple is the leader in this, and Amazon follows closely behind.

What are you getting with the Kindle Fire? We are getting an experience, something that works perfectly out of the box with the whole environment to make the best of it in a matter of minutes, be it video, music or books/comics/magazines. We get:

• Access to the kindle bookstore (millions of books)
• Access to hundreds of full color magazines
• Access to 100.000 movies & TV shows
• Access to the Amazon App store, full of Android Apps & games
• Access to 17 million songs
• Free cloud storage

And...

Beautifully simple and easy to use (thats what they say)

You may say that with this or that android tablet you have access to an App store and books and whatever... but in the end, what you really want is something your 3year old kid can use because it's as simple as 1-2-3 and that gives you all in a single package. And for only $199!

The iPad Killer?

Is it the iPad-killer? No, of course not. And I don't think Amazon has designed the strategy around it to fight the iPad. Amazon is, at the moment, in a different war, the war that Techcrunch says they've won today.

Today the war was about Android tablets, and Amazon has simply cleared the way to attempt the assault on the iPad. Today Amazon has stated its intentions to Apple: "Hey Mr. Apple, I'm here, I have a good product with  all the power of my online store, cloud, services, etc... I've crushed the other Androids with a single blow and now I'll come for you". 

The rumor is that early 2012 there will be a new Kindle Fire with a bigger, ten inch, screen and prepared for the fight with the iPad. According to this rumor the current Kindle Fire will only be a first step that will get the wheel spinning around, getting speed for the "real" launch. Seems a reasonable strategy and I hope it is true because it will be good for all of us. Competition always is.