Fire burns iPad

Before the Kindle Fire was launched I was thinking it would be less a rival for the iPad and more a rival for other Android tablets. Now I think it is a really effective rival for the iPad. Amazon have out Apple'd Apple through effective implementation of the "less is more" philosophy and Apple finally have serious competition in the tablet space. The answer to one simple question will worry Apple more than anything else and illustrates why, to my mind at least, Amazon are about to pull off a great success;

"Which is the more techie device ?"

The answer for tablets pre-Fire was never iPad. Now it is.

Amazon have also, for me, illustrated why Apple are right in their complaints about Samsung copying. Here is a company who have come along, analyzed the problem and thought carefully about how they can best leverage their assets to serve the market. It will be a success precisely because they have learned key lessons from Apple and applied them intelligently. Amazon have attacked an internally consistent and coherent portion of the tablet Use Case that also happens to be the most significant Use Case for tablets as a whole; Content consumption. The result is something unique and effective, an always open portable shop for content be it games, books, music, movies or apps. They have recognised, according to the "less is more philosophy," if you look at how tablets are actually used, you better serve the majority of user time by taking "iTunes" or the online store, and expanding it to be not just the centre of the OS but the whole of the OS. They have played to their strengths and asset base made the OS the centre point for loading and consuming content. iOS by contrast fragments the buy and "consume content" use-case across a number of areas of the OS (most noticeably dividing iTunes and iPod). The Fire illustrates iOS has perhaps a little more old school PC centric thinking than even Apple realized. I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs will be highly respectful of what Amazon have unveiled and achieved - something that can't be said of his other tablet rivals.