Amazon lights up the fire with Kindle Fire
This is my take on the recently launched tablet device by Amazon called Kindle Fire.
Why Amazon Did This
The first question one might ask is that why Amazon, primarily known for selling books, has entered the world of tablet devices, in the presence of giants like Apple and Samsung.
To answer that, let me clarify that Amazon is no more just a book selling company. It has slowly turned into a company that sells all forms of content, from books to music to videos to e-books and audio books to mobile (android) applications and cloud-based applications. Currently Amazon is offering streaming videos, mp3 store, kindle books, electronic magazines and newspapers, android applications and games through their website, all within Amazon boundaries. Plus they are offer cloud based storage to store all your digital content.
Not to mention the huge inventory of other electronic devices, apparel, and pretty much everything that amazon sells on their website.
Like all other media companies, Amazon has to ensure maximum people are using Amazon products and buying their stuff from Amazon, in order to maximize their profits. With so much content in the offerings, it’s only natural to need so many customers to access all that content.
To best way to achieve that is to come up with a media consumption device which makes it easy and painless to integrate everything amazon has to offer, along with other standard features that are common on mobile devices.
And that’s how Amazon came up with Kindle Fire.
Kindle Fire is the one-stop device to access all-things-amazon, from e-books to movies, in a seamless fashion. Add a fully functional web browser and you don’t need any other device to access the internet. It gets even better by availability of plethora of applications through Amazon Android App Store. This is all backed up by Amazon Cloud Storage so you have practically unlimited storage to keep your books, music and videos collection. You really don’t need to go elsewhere for most of your content related needs.
So that’s the motivation behind Kindle Fire and why Amazon jumped into the tablet race.
Why It Will Sell
And the reason why Amazon will be successful in selling this device is because of its price.
The launch price of Kindle Fire is $199. Now that’s a killer price. In the long run this might go down but even now there is no other device in the market which is even close to this price. And it make sense for Amazon to sell Kindle Fire at this price because they want to sell as many of these as possible. Every Kindle Fire sold will result in hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars of additional revenue to Amazon by giving people access to other Amazon services which of course cost extra. One small example is Amazon Prime. If you are a loyal Amazon customer there is no reason you shouldn’t subscribe to Amazon Prime. Some of the benefits include free 2-day shipping (which is charged extra for non-prime customers), and unlimited streaming videos. So if buying a Kindle Fire means you submit to Amazon ecosystem then first thing Amazon would expect from you is to become Amazon Prime member. That’s $79 a year. If half of Kindle Fire users buy Amazon Prime and if Amazon ends up selling many millions of these then just imagine the additional revenue it will bring.
So the introductory price of $199 makes perfect sense. At that price Kindle Fire will take the tablet market by storm. And Amazon content delivery system is mature enough to provide a complete experience to the users without looking outside of Amazon Ecosystem.
I am very excited about Kindle Fire. I might even buy it, after figuring out how to access Amazon content from UAE.