Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

First, we’ll start off with a prediction Tim O’Reilly made in a Forbes article, on February 23rd, 2009 -

Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.

Since then, the Kindle 2 has been released, sans openness, and gone on to be a BIG hit. Amazon and Kindle’s#1 position in ebooks has been cemented.

Today, WSJ’s Brett Arends writes ‘Kindle in danger of becoming ebook’s BetaMax’ -

Amazon’s competitors, after fumbling about like the Washington Nationals for the past couple of years, are starting to get their act together. They’re moving toward a shared e-book format, called ePub, that’s different from the one on the Kindle …

“I think Amazon has overestimated their power in the value chain,” says Gartner’s Weiner. “I don’t think their proprietary format is going to have the ability to compete with ePub if that’s offered by everybody else.”

At least the Washington Nationals get Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper for all their bumbling. All Amazon’s competitors get are Tim O’Reilly and Brett Arends’ illogical arguments.

Lets dig deeper into the claim that the kindle format is going to become BetaMax.

Kindle format says – the Report of my death is greatly exaggerated

To be precise it’s totally made up.

Instead of the comparisons to BetaMax in 1975 (by the way, openness was just one of many reasons BetaMax failed) we should look at more recent examples.

Here are a few companies that haven’t fallen for the ‘openness’ strategy of a competitor that is late to market and trying to trick the leader into lowering its walls -

1. Facebook – It didn’t join the OpenSocial ‘movement’ that most other social networks did. It’s doing much, much better than they are.  
2. Microsoft and Apple – The OSes aren’t open and they’re still #1 and #2.

Think about it from a strategy perspective – Why would you make it easy for your competitors to overtake you?

What going Open is really about

This is what Tim O’Reilly and Brett Arends are really saying -

1. If you don’t go open there’s a 25% chance openness as a strategy and everyone else banding together beats you.  

What they aren’t saying, knowingly or unknowingly, is -

If you do go open your strategic advantage gets reduced and there’s a 50% chance your competitors can beat you.

Additionally, there’s the risk that your devices get reduced to mere platforms while someone else makes money off of selling books.

When you consider that Tim O’Reilly is a publisher who would love to have the devices become dumb, so he can make more money, his argument doesn’t seem as altruistic, does it?  

Closing Thoughts on the Kindle Format

Amazon is restricting things to their own format and it seems so politically incorrect – How dare you have a closed system on your device and actually make money from what you created.  

However, one single format simplifies a lot of things.

Yes, kindle format is under threat because every other company in the world might band together with all the publishers and work out a new, magic format that everyone adopts and works across all devices.

It’s rather unlikely to happen.

The way to address that threat is to make apps like Kindle for iPhone available that work on all these ‘open’ devices. Use their ‘openness’ strategy against them. 

Amazon is already doing that.

Unless Amazon seems ePub gain sufficient traction and become a real threat, there’s no way they’ll add ePub support. They’d be crazy to if they’re winning.

Let’s take a real world analogy. If a new start-up went to WalMart and said -

You should be open – let us sell products through your physical stores while we pay nothing for store upkeep, no cut to you, etc.

We’d all be laughing at the company’s cheekiness. Surely, they must be joking.  

Magically, when people use the same ridiculous arguments online, it’s all sugar and spice and all things nice.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | altruism, lack thereof