jeff bezos house
When Apple introduced its second-generation iPad earlier this year, then-CEO Steve Jobs used the word "flummoxed" to describe his company's erstwhile competitors in the tablet market. He was right; the competition has been scattered, and mostly inept.
Until now? Perhaps so, with Wednesday's launch of the Kindle Fire, Amazon's entry into the market. But this device, at just under $200, is to the iPad (about $500 in its least expensive version) as a cheap sedan is to a Lexus SUV: functional and useful, but nowhere near as elegant or powerful.
Indeed, the Fire, Amazon's first effort in this genre, is plainly not intended to compete head-to-head with the iPad. It's smaller, much less capable in terms of features and hardware – and 60% cheaper. [For the sake of disclosure: I own some Amazon shares.]
The Fire is just one of several devices Amazon announced at a New York event. But it's by far the most important, for what it says about the tablet marketplace. The market, at least for the time being, is bifurcating between the luxury models (iPad and, in distant runner-up position, high-end Android tablets), which can do many things well, and utilitarian models (such as Fire, running a modified version of Google's Android, and a number of other, pure-Android devices), which are intended mainly as media-consuming devices.
jeff bezos house
jeff bezos house
jeff bezos house
jeff bezos house
jeff bezos house
