How Amazon’s new tablet signals the start of next generation

geekwire.com

7 points·webwright··2 comments

I think the interesting thing in the looming Amazon/Apple battle is their approach to the app store. Apple considers themselves a hardware company, and sees the marketplace portion to be a loss-leader.

Amazon doesn't care about the hardware side of the business-- they see the device as a catalog-- perhaps a bigger gateway to commerce and intent than Google.com ever was. Making profit on hardware is like Google charging users to do searches-- there are much more elegant ways to make money with mobile devices than simply charging for hardware.

You're right, Amazon's Kindle line is a catalog device and much like print catalogs, they're sold at a subsidized loss with the hopes of generating core business sales, but the Kindles aren't core to their business in the same manner as the iOS devices are core to Apple's.

Their use cases and population sets are so disparate that anyone making a claim that Amazon has somehow entered a tablet war with Apple is either an AMZN investor or is someone hell-bent to get their name in print regardless of the accuracy of their assumptions or their tolerance for embarrassment. That's if there was a theoretical tablet war in the first place.

Please read: http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/30/the-case-against-the-kindle...

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