I've been playing with my new Kindle Fire for the past 24 hours, and I have to say it's a nice little device. The display is nice and crisp. Video streaming from Amazon worked great, or maybe I was just really excited watching episode one of Felix the Cat while walking around my house...
You do get the feeling that they've optimized this device for streaming content from their servers. That's really important since it only has a 6.54G hard drive. Netflix streaming is good as well. Battery life seems about on par with other devices. Sound quality is pretty good as well.
It's a nice little device, but you really need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the most out of it. This is definitely a content consuming device, and you Prime gives you access to no cost downloads and free book borrowing. And I can't wait 'til they beef up their movie/tv content libraries.
But I'm not writing this to do an in depth review of Kindle Fire. Believe me you'll be able to find those anywhere you look. I'm writing this because year in and year out Amazon does things that impact customer experiences and business models. And while so much of our collective business focus is on Google and Facebook and Apple - which is totally understandable - Amazon is the most fascinating company to watch for me. I expect that to be the case in 2012 as well.
I think I bought my first book on Bezos and the Amazon.com crew in 1995 or 1996, back before I ever Googled anything and before Mark Zuckerberg was born...ok not really, but he had to be in grade school at most. And when many people panned them for not turning a profit in the early days of ecommerce, they stuck with it and proved to everyone buying online was the future.
They perfected the art of distribution and logistics, and turned fulfillment into competitive advantage. They used the transactional and behavior data from the things we bought and the products we looked at to recommend similar things...in order to sell us more stuff more efficiently. And by applying extreme analysis and business intelligence tools and best practices, they combined their logistical expertise with their customer knowledge and created Amazon Prime.
I've been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, because paying $79 a year to get free two day shipping on anything I buy seemed too good to be true. Apparently I wasn't alone in this thinking as millions of people jumped on board. So Amazon turned sporadic purchases into a membership program that -at least in my case- led to more buying (and more regular buying) than would have occurred without it. To me this was a stroke of genius, and one of the early examples of the power of The Subscription Economy.
I haven't even got to how they changed the way most of us buy books with the original Kindle. Or how when they added profiles years ago to your Amazon account they created a more social experience to buying stuff long before most people knew what social networks were. Or how once they built out their infrastructure and best practices for running their business they made it available to other business and became pioneers in cloud computing. Or how they created their own Android App Store to leverage the power of mobility. Or now how they've created their own Android tablet in the Kindle Fire - which is optimized to work with their cloud services for streaming content...with their new Silk browser.
Yeah the Kindle Fire is cool little device that is getting a lot of attention, and at its price I'm sure it will expand the tablet-buying population, making these devices even more popular. But this is just another example of how Amazon keeps doing things to stay connected to their customers. Giving them what they want buy knowing what they want, how they wanted, when they wanted..etc, etc, etc, And they know we want access to content immediately from wherever we are. They still need to work on the video content, but with the opening Netflix has given them you have to believe that will be addressed in 2012. But what may be even more interesting is to see what they do that we aren't expecting. They have a habit of doing stuff like that.