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.