What the Kindle needs for success
I was watching a video of Scoble interviewing Tim O’Reilly in which O’Reilly talks about the Kindle and his belief that it isn’t doing very well. O’Reilly ascribes that to the locked down software (i.e, novels) that ship with the Kindle.
Certainly early adopters don’t appreciate DRM’ed media, but it’s possible that there are other factors at work here. In my own analysis, the Kindle must do one of the following to be successful:
a. meet an unmet need – for example, travel comparison websites or online photo galleries
b. outperform an existing product by orders of magnitude – digital cameras comes to mind here; or
c. Be so cheap that the advantages of an existing product are completely nullified.
Those are the only USP’s that matter.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on January 5, 2009 at 11:12 am antrix wrote:
This recent Kindle post by Philip Greenspun makes a very strong case: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/12/31/amazon-kindle-bites-the-dust-187-to-fix/
PS: Can you please fix the tab-order for your comment form? Name (tab) e-mail (tab) website (tab) Comment-field & not (b) (tab) (i) (tab) etc.
on January 5, 2009 at 3:59 pm Balaji wrote:
antrix : The author of that post puts his finger on a very good point – the total cost of ownership of this device. Everyone knows that early adopters pay a premium, but the flip-side is that you expect costs to come down as adoption increases. Instead here we have a product that:
1. is completely locked down, offering you no recourse if you stop being an amazon customer.
2. is expensive and isn’t getting any cheaper; and
3. has a high chance of becoming a paperweight.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a product’s benefits I’d say.
PS: Thanks for pointing out the tab-order problems. I’ve fixed it now. You should be able to do name->email->website->comment field->post comment button. Let me know if you still have a problem.
on January 5, 2009 at 4:12 pm Deeps wrote:
I don’t own one but have heard abt the kindle that the its (its battery life ) cannot last a transatlantic > 18 hrs flight.
on January 5, 2009 at 4:22 pm Balaji wrote:
Deeps: Ah see, that’s one of the things that irritates me about the Kindle. When I’m reading, I don’t want to worry about where the nearest plug point is.
I’m a huge book-lover but I’m not sure if I could ever bring myself to switch to e-books.
on January 7, 2009 at 11:41 am Ashwin Nanjappa wrote:
Can the Kindle be used to read our own text/doc/pdf files?
on January 8, 2009 at 10:36 am Balaji wrote:
Ashwin: From what I understand, text files can be read directly. But reading doc/pdf files requires some kind of workaround wherein you email the files to yourself via a conversion service (and that conversion costs .10c per file)
on January 8, 2009 at 4:24 pm Ashwin Nanjappa wrote:
If someone can provide an easy and safe way to jailbreak it so it can read any format from a thumbdrive, it would sell more
on January 8, 2009 at 6:27 pm Balaji wrote:
Ashwin: There doesn’t seem to have been too much interest in hacking the Kindle. Could also be due to the fact that the hardware has been extremely hard to get hold of. Plus, how many books do you think hackers read?