Monday, October 10, 2011

Sunny, with a big chance of Clouds...

I'm fairly certain that you've heard of the new Kindle Fire from Amazon - it's a Kindle/tablet combination to allow people to read, surf the web, play music, watch movies, and generally do anythings that's possible on the Internet.  When I first heard about the newest Kindle, my immediate reaction was "Yeah! That sounds amazing!"  My second reaction was "Rats! I already have a Kindle and an Android tablet.  I cannot justify buying the new Kindle Fire for myself. :-(" 

Then I started considering why Amazon made such a wonder.  The current generation of Kindles provide a fairly comprehensive e-reader.  I have both written books and audio books, one magazine, and several PDFs stored on mine, as well as several word games.  My Kindle does more than I ever expected it to, so why the Kindle Fire?

Then it hit me - the Amazon Cloud!

The Kindle Fire provides all sorts of services through Amazon Cloud Services - music, movies, television, and books, just to name the most obvious ones.  If Amazon sells enough Kindle Fires, then people will not only use their cloud service, but a lot of people will essentially be locked in.  I say "essentially" because Amazon will let you download the music and books you buy, so you could theoretically move them to another cloud service.  Buy why do that?

I think that Amazon is making a bold move with the Kindle Fire, but I also think that they are smart.  Cloud services for the regular, home consumer are just taking off.  By selling the Kindle Fire, Amazon will hopefully get a large part of the audience.

I know that someone out there is wondering - will this work?

Yes, yes it will.

I myself am a Google person.  On my Android tablet alone, I use Google Music to listen to the music I uploaded to the Google Cloud, Gmail to check my multiple email accounts, Google + for social networking, Google Calendar to track my schedule, Google Docs for writing, Blogger to create fast blog posts, Google Voice to listen to voice mail from my Google Phone number, Google Maps to get driving directions, and YouTube to watch videos.  (I also use the Amazon Kindle app to read books purchased from Amazon.)

To put it mildly, I am a user of Google Cloud services, up to and including hosting the wegrok.net domain.

If Amazon can attract similarly dedicated user, then they will be ahead of their competition.


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