The Kindle Fire promises to take on the iPad in a way none of Apple's existing rivals can.
Jeff Bezos, photo/Getty Images
Amid all the technologists and entrepreneurs touted as a potential heir apparent for the late great Steve Jobs, one name is repeatedly if begrudgingly mentioned: Jeff Bezos. The founder of Amazon has built a massively successful online retailing operation over the past 17 years. It started out selling books and CDs and now offers everything from electronics and toys to furniture and food.
Perhaps unfairly, Bezos has never been considered a technologist to be mentioned in the same breath as Jobs or Bill Gates. But that may be set to change as he embarks on an ambitious journey to unify online content in a way Jobs would truly appreciate. Bezos displayed a flourish of Jobsian vision back in 2007 when he released the Kindle e-book reader, which has sold incredibly well but stayed as low key as its greyscale screen. That changed three weeks ago when Bezos, in a performance eerily reminiscent of one of Apple’s famous launch rallies, unveiled the Kindle Fire – a full-blown seven-inch tablet that – priced at just US$199 – promises to take on the iPad in a way none of Apple’s existing tablet rivals can.
Amazon’s access to consumers – it sold them US$34 billion worth of goods last year, its increasingly adept way of organising content online and its new hardware line-up make it more akin to Apple than traditional rivals such as Google and Microsoft. Numerous Apple rivals produce tablets, but none of them have gained traction against the iPad despite employing the Google Android operating system to good effect. That’s because no one else has its online act together the way Apple and Amazon have.
In many respects, the cloud is where the next renaissance of innovation is likely to take place. Jobs gave us the devices and inspired the industry at large to create an ever-increasing range of screen form factors on which to view and interact with content. Just a few days after Jobs was laid to rest at a small family funeral in California, his last big innovation – the iCloud – made its debut. It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see it adopted by masses of Apple users, because it’s a concept that goes to the heart of his philosophy about ease of use and a decluttered computing experience.
The iCloud service lets Apple customers store their music, photos and purchased apps online and share them across all of their Apple devices. So if you buy a song from iTunes on your iPhone, it’s immediately available on your MacBook or iPad, accessed via the same iCloud account. It means the iTunes software on your computer is no longer the essential hub tying together the Apple world. All your content is available as and where you need it, as long as you have internet connectivity. The catch is that the service works firmly in the Apple world, using the iOS operating system. If you have a BlackBerry as your phone, for instance, it will be out of the content loop.
The Kindle Fire
Here, Amazon has already reared its head with a more flexible offering that competes directly with the iCloud. Amazon’s Cloud Player and Cloud Drive let you store content online and stream it to any device with the Cloud Player software on it – namely any device running Android. Together with the innovative Whispernet service, which sends books and magazines to the Kindle wirelessly, and the movie-streaming service Amazon offers to its premium customers, it has a strong online offering. All this makes more sense with the Kindle Fire in the picture.
Apple and Amazon could be the answer to the lack of options we have for streaming media and online content in this part of the world. Both operate internationally, though with a US-centric view. As their cloud offerings become increasingly integrated, it’s hard to serve an international audience while ring-fencing content regionally. Wherever you look, the cloud is still a little clunky for consumers. For all of its reliance on cloud computing, Google still doesn’t deliver a seamless online experience, and Microsoft’s cloud services haven’t really fired yet.
Some of the real innovations in the cloud space have come, not surprisingly, from start-ups like Dropbox, which adds an online storage locker to your computer file system that you can drag and drop files into to share with friends and colleagues. It epitomises the innovation that is needed in the cloud space if we are to truly exploit the legacy Steve Jobs has left.
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