Macadamian Blog

Finally, the iPad has a real challenger - Amazon’s Kindle Fire

Since April 2010, the industry has been waiting for a genuine competitor to the iPad. While there are dozens of Android tablets on the market, none have made a serious dent in Apple's market share, which is hovering at a healthy 80% of tablet sales 

Enter the Kindle Fire.

How can Amazon, an online retailer and a relative latecomer, stand to steal market share away from Apple and be a real contender in the tablet space, when seasoned consumer electronics companies like Samsung and Motorola have yet to make a serious dent? 

Precisely because they are not a consumer electronics company.The keys to the iPad's success are the great experience design and the seamless way consumers can discover and acquire content. Tablets are all about the lean-back experience - accessing content, whether it be books, music, the web, or video on the comfort of your couch or by the poolside on vacation. When they released the iPad, Apple made sure to have the whole ecosystem in place, including a number of Apps designed specifically for the iPad, making browsing and acquiring content easy and even delightful. Amazon is the first competitor to enter the tablet space with all that in place, plus an innovative new web browser that leverages their cloud services to speed up browsing, and they've designed the user experience from ground up.

The consumer electronics companies, on the other hand, are releasing undifferentiated Android tablets, and selling on features and price - who has the fastest processor, or the camera with the most mega-pixels.  Tablets are a mainstream consumer play, and mainstream consumers don't care that the processor is dual-core, or that it's running the latest version of Android. Look at how Amazon is positioning the Fire, vs how Motorola positions the Xoom. The Fire boasts access to "18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books" while the Xoom has a "dual-core processor and Android 3.1".

While everyone else is fighting for a small piece of the 30% that Apple has left to Android, Amazon's not even mentioning that the Fire is an Android device. Instead focusing on what really matters - creating a delightful, end-to-end experience for consuming content. Somehow, they've done it for $199; a price that I suspect is subsidized to drive content sales, but will likely be the magic price-point for consumers.