the reductionist ethos of the Kindle Fire
Let’s talk about shiny toys. Specifically, the new Kindle Fire HD. I read a lot of tech news, so when the original Kindle Fire came out and the new Fire HD arrived, I was amused by the reaction of many tech reviewers. In particular, how they seemed offended that the Kindle Fire was not an iPad.
This review by David Pogue is a good example:
Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.
All this is true. The Kindle Fire is a substantially simpler device than the iPad, and it can do less stuff. But that’s not significant, because it overlooks a key point.
Namely, that tablets are first and foremost consumption devices. The vast majority of tablet users don’t use their devices for work or content creation, but the passive consumption of media – web pages, videos, games, and so forth.
More specifically, people who buy a tablet use it for five things:
-Recreational web browsing.
-Watching videos.
-Playing games.
-Checking email/Facebook/social networking.
-Light ebook reading.
The iPad can do a lot more than all that. If you get a Bluetooth keyboard dock for it, you can practically use it as a full-fledged PC device. You can do spreadsheets on it, you can VPN into your office, you can hook it up to a projector and do presentations, you can take pictures and videos and edit them, all kinds of things.
But!
I’d wager that a significant majority of the people who buy an iPad actually use it for recreational web browsing, watching videos, playing games, email/social networking, and occasional ebooks. Practically speaking, if you want to get an iPad dock and use it for work, you’re really better off getting a lower-end laptop for around $300 and $400. It will do everything the iPad can and more. But if you just want to sit on the couch at night and browse the web (as the majority of tablet users do) why spend $499 on a device to do that? Especially when you can do the same thing for under $199.
This was the excellent idea behind the original Kindle Fire. Amazon took the core functionality of a tablet – media consumption – and pared it down to a $199 device. Sure, you could do some extra tablet-y type things with it, but the main focus was media consumption. The original Fire only got middling reviews at best in the tech press, but Amazon sold millions of the things anyway. More technical reviewers care about features like Bluetooth and GPS, but the average tablet user didn’t want an iPad killer. The average tablet wanted a cheap device for media consumption.
The Kindle Fire HD as a refinement of this underlying concept. It’s still a bare-bones tablet designed primarily for media consumption. This time Amazon added a few additional features – Bluetooth, more storage, a Skype client, better speakers – but it’s still basically a device designed for passive media consumption and casual web browsing. The iPad can do more – but most home users who buy iPads wind up using them for passive media consumption and casual web browsing. Some do wind up using their iPads essentially as laptops, but most do not.
So Amazon’s idea has been to refine the tablet down to its essential nature – media consumption – first in the Fire and then in the Fire HD. I predict that while iPads will remain popular with more technically-minded (and wealthier) users, the Fire line will continue to do just fine.
-JM