Anne Zelenka is right to be skeptical of Kindle
My gut tells me that Kindle will go the way of poopy brown Zunes and Segways.
1. Expensive hardware.
2. Cheap looking hardware.
3. Expensive content.
4. Un-innovative software.
5. A name that sounds like firewood.
I like Amazon - a lot. I think its really hard for a startup to come along and beat a company that has so much infrastructure and logistics nailed, and I like the innovation in S3 and EC2.
But the Kindle has dog written all over it. Amazon needed to do something really disruptive here and this is not a disruptive product.
Ebook readers have not taken off, and the difference between laptops and readers is narrowing. I suspect a market slice is needed to gain traction and that education could provide that in a way that would be world changing.
What I’d like to see is a Kindle like product for schools and universities, worldwide - a reader meets the $100 laptop. Education is an area where lowered royalties could be made for developing countries allowing for a device that could give every child on earth access to the same textbooks.
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