Tag Archives: amazon

More on eBooks and the Justice Department

April 15, 2012 – 7:31 pm

Amazon Low Prices Disguise a High Cost – NYTimes.com:

““It is breathtaking to stand back and look at this and believe that this is in the public interest,” he said. “The only rationale is e-book prices will go down, for how long? What happens when there is no one left to compete with them?””

(Via The New York Times.)

This article sums up my feelings about this weird eBook DOJ case. Sure, in the short term prices may go down, but once Amazon has 100% of the market, where will the prices go? The short-sightedness of this whole thing is jaw-dropping.

This case has nothing to do with preserving competition. The government is guaranteeing the opposite by giving the already de facto monopolist Amazon an even bigger upper hand. When I read the official complaint, my first gut reaction was that someone at Amazon had actually written it and handed it over to the DOJ to copy verbatim. I guess Amazon has stronger lobbyists than Apple and the book publishers do.

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iBooks can’t have links to Amazon books – Duh

February 29, 2012 – 4:32 pm

Apple rejects iBook with links to Amazon’s store:

Before anyone starts yelling about censorship, keep in mind that this is Apple’s playground, and it can take its ball home whenever it wants, no matter how inane the reason. But this reason seems particularly inane — Apple can’t really be worried about one link in a ebook promoting a competitor’s sales, right? Not to mention that the book in question was a hardcover copy, and unless I’m mistaken, wasn’t even sold on Apple’s iBooks store anyway.

(Via TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Well, actually, it’s several links to Amazon’s store, not one. And I don’t find that an inane reason at all. I don’t remember ever going into a Target and buying a product there that gave me several tips on how to buy things at Wal Mart.

This argument is silly to me. It’s simply bad form to try and sell a product in one store that repeatedly refers customers to another competing store. End of story.

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Apple doesn’t counter anyone. They lead; everyone else follows.

October 12, 2011 – 2:07 pm

Spurred by the recently announced Amazon Kindle Fire and its $199 price, Apple is rumored to be exploring a new low-cost iPad for release in the first few months of 2012.

Analyst Brian White with Ticonderoga Securities has been touring China and Taiwan and meeting with component suppliers, where he has heard rumblings of a so-called “iPad mini” arriving next year. The “mini” name doesn’t necessarily refer to the size of the device, he said, but a lower entry-level price.

He said such a device is expected to arrive in the first few months of 2012, allowing Apple to tap into a “more price sensitive consumer segment,” and also fend off the Amazon Kindle Fire, the retailer’s first entrance into the touchscreen tablet market.

via AppleInsider

This sort of thing is so stupid I don’t even know where to start.

Or maybe I do. First and foremost, Apple doesn’t build new products because it’s “spurred” by someone else’s products. If there were a lower-cost iPad coming next year, it would have been in development for some time.

Knee-jerk reaction is what other companies do.

Second, rumors like this always assume that price is something that companies simply pluck out thin air, as if making things for less than you sell them weren’t important. Believe me, if Apple could make the current iPad cheaper without sacrificing quality, it would. But it can’t, so it won’t.

The Fire will sell quite well, I’m sure, but not because it’s any threat to the iPad.

Amazon can make cheap tablets until it’s blue in the face, because Amazon is fine with losing money on every tablet sold. They make it up on the content you buy. While Apple makes a small profit on the content, its main source of income has always been on the hardware itself. It can’t afford to lose money on cheap iPads in the hopes that you buy lots of iBooks and music. And it wouldn’t want to, because that would mean selling cheap crap, which is antithetical to everything Apple is.

So, maybe, maybe, we could see a small price drop on the entry level iPad next year. Maybe they’ll continue to sell the iPad 2 at a cheaper rate when they release the iPad 3, like they do with iPhones. But don’t expect a $199 iPad from Apple next year. It’s just not in the cards. And it doesn’t have to be, because Kindle Fire buyers aren’t going to take away any sales from potential iPad owners.

The only companies that will suffer from the Kindle Fire are all the other Android makers. (And suffer they will.)

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Jeff Bezos on innovation – GeekWire

June 30, 2011 – 7:47 pm

When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago….  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.

But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?

via geekwire.com

Sometimes I think Bezos is one of only a handful of CEOs out there who are even close to Steve Jobs’ level of understanding when it comes to vision.

People aren’t wrong when they say a possible Amazon Tablet would be the one product to give the iPad a run for its money. It would certainly destroy every other Android/Palm/RIM/whatever out there. And while I don’t think it would “kill” the iPad, by any means, a tablet that comes from one of the world’s greatest retailers, that has an established set of media stores, and is being driven by someone with the mind of Bezos has a great chance of carving its own niche of success, at least.

The trick for Bezos will be establishing that differentiation. Why buy this instead of the iPad? Will it be cheaper? Will it have access to more content? The Kindle isn’t the most elegant piece of hardware on earth, but it’s selling very well, because it doesn’t try to compete with the iPad or iPod touch. It’s a great reader—nothing more. And it’s relatively cheap. So what will make the Amazon tablet special?

This is the product to watch out for over the next several months.

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KERUFF, responding to Musically’s article on Amazon’s and Google’s online music ventures

May 12, 2011 – 7:45 pm

Amazon & Google play into Apple’s hands with their early, incomplete music stores

Musically:

Apple likes to be late, and better. So by racing to market without licences, have Google and Amazon simply set their services up as the Creative Nomad jukeboxes of the cloud music age? Ironically, by launching without deals from labels, both companies may have given Apple the leverage it needs to strike the very licensing deals that will help its cloud service blow them out of the water.

I think Musically could be right. And there’s certainly no first mover advantage on the scale that Apple had with the iPad. One month here or there won’t make much difference. Especially as it strikes me that both Amazon and Google have released half baked products that will look pretty shoddy when Apple announces their service, probably in June.

via samradford.com

I completely agree, and I’d add that the first mover advantage is even less of an issue in this case, because as of now streaming music lockers is still more of a nerd’s dream than anything the average person knows he or she wants yet.

Until the 4G/WiFi infrastructure improves, having digital music stored in the cloud is much more of a “nice to have” than a replacement for local storage. Especially where I live in San Francisco, the notion of having an iPod that can only get its music from the cloud is silly, at best. I’d be lucky to have 3G or wireless access 40% of the time when I’m away from home or work.

So Apple can certainly take its time here. I wouldn’t be surprised if streaming online music is only a small part of the “iCloud” product. And depending on how long the deal takes with the labels, it may even not be a part of the initial announcement. Amazon and Google sure did make negotiations easier for Apple, though.

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