Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

While the Kindle 3 adds a lot of improvements one area that has been totally ignored is user profiles – a feature that would let all the Kindle users in a family set up their own Kindle user profiles.

The need for multiple Kindle user profiles was brought up in a Kindle article recently and it’s also being discussed in the forums. Here’s my take on the pros and cons from Amazon’s perspective -  

Reasons a multi-user Kindle makes sense for Amazon

1. It lets parents give their Kindles to their kids. Turn off the ability to buy books, set some parental controls, and your kids can use your Kindle freely. 
2. It lets family members share Kindles. A 4 member family could get by on 2 Kindles since they could set up their own profiles and their own settings.  
3. It’s a competitive advantage over other eReaders and other reading devices.  
4. User profiles are something users are used to with computers.
5. It gives Amazon more precise information. It wouldn’t just know which Kindle buys what it’d know which user buys what.

Overall, there are a few strong reasons for Amazon to consider adding Kindle user profiles.

There are also, unfortunately, some reasons adding Kindle user profiles would be painful to Amazon.

Reasons a multi-user Kindle hurts Amazon

1. Opportunity Cost. Adding user profiles, testing them, and adding features that make sense if you have user profiles (quick switching, parental controls, etc.) will take a ton of time and effort. Time and effort that is perhaps better used to add new features or go in a different direction – Kindle App Store, Kindle Apps for new platforms, better reading experience, Color Kindle, Kindle Tablet.
2. Complexity for Amazon. The testing matrix becomes horrendously complex with user profiles. Developing becomes much tougher since every new feature would have to support user profiles. User profiles are something that affect every other thing on the Kindle - They are not like PDF support which stays in its own neat little box.
3. Complexity for Users. Using the Kindle becomes tougher too because there’s an extra layer - the user profile - underlying everything. Instead of ‘pick up and read’ we would have ‘pick up, don’t find your book or find the wrong settings, get upset, realize you have to change the user profile, change it, and then read’. You’ve suddenly made the Kindle tougher to use.  
4. Books didn’t have Privacy and User profiles. It’s an alien concept to have a book that morphs based on who’s reading it. The Kindle is trying to be as close to a physical book as possible and adding a feature that computers have to a book replacement device makes little sense.
5. Lower Kindle sales. Amazon would sell less Kindles. A family of 4 would try to get by on 2 instead of buying 4. A couple would try to share one Kindle. This is, arguably, the single biggest reason Amazon will never add a multi-user feature to Kindles. Amazon wants every single person to have a Kindle. Its unofficial motto is not ‘a computer on every desk’ – its ‘a Kindle in every pair of hands’.

The last reason and the first reason are the ones that Amazon probably weighs the most – either of these reasons is enough to outweigh all the benefits.

Would a company add a feature that increases user’s satisfaction 10% but reduces sales 20%? Perhaps not.

Would a company add a feature that improves the product 10% but distracts from features that improve the product 50%? Probably not.

A multi-user Kindle does more harm than good and on top of that harm it distracts Amazon from focusing on the superkiller features.

Kindle Like Button

Saw a Like button on the Kindle product page yesterday. It was a bit puzzling and now it’s gone. Perhaps it’s something that’s being tested.

Here are some suggestions -

1. Add a ‘Poorly Formatted’ button.  
2. Add a ‘This Publisher is a Greedy Pig’ button. 
3. Add a ‘Love’ button. Who wants a book that people merely ‘Like’ when they can read a book people absolutely love?
4. What about a ‘Hate’ button. Perhaps a more mild ‘Dislike’ button.  

TechCrunch talks about the Amazon Like button so it’s probably site wide. TechCrunch also points out that Amazon is being rather smart -

Interestingly, below the Like button, there’s a check-box that reads “Don’t use for recommendations”.A huge part of Amazon’s business is recommendations.

Currently, they look at what you’ve been browsing for on Amazon and especially what you’ve bought. This Like button will give them one more explicit signal, something in-between browsing and buying.

The first good thing is not using Facebook’s Like button which would send all this valuable information to Mr. Sell-It-All and the second good thing is letting users control whether their ‘Like’ information is factored into recommendations.

Would Amazon buy B&N?  It’s bought Diapers.com so it’s certainly possible

One of the most interesting competitors to Amazon was Diapers.com. In many ways it had the potential to be the most deadly competitor (other than the UK’s Play.com) since it was doing ridiculously smart things like using robots in its warehouse and bending over backwards for its customers. Here’s a snippet from an absolutely beautiful BusinessWeek article about Diapers.com and its threat to Amazon -

Lore and Bharara did about $180 million in revenue in 2009 and expect to bring in about $300 million in 2010. Just five years old, …

Bezos has been on their minds as both a hero and a rival since they founded Diapers.com.

“We’re obsessed with Amazon. We study it like crazy,” he says. “Recently I read every 10-K since 1996. It’s interesting to read all those 10-Ks in a row. They were doing so many things so soon.”

The only two reasons to be obsessed with a company are to learn from it and to overtake it. Diapers.com’s moves clearly show it was more interested in the latter. It had started Soap.com to expand beyond Diapers and the founders have talked about their expansion plans non-stop.

In many ways Diapers.com was almost as much of a threat as WalMart and Play.com (a UK only company that ships from Jersey and avoids paying VAT).

Amazon just eradicated that huge threat by buying Diapers.com for $540 million. It seems Amazon also beat out WalMart in the race to acquire Diapers.com. From the perspective of Diapers.com it makes little sense to sell to Amazon when its on the verge of becoming a real challenger – the only explanation is that investors (Diapers.com had funding of $78 million) got tired of waiting for high profitability and forced the Diapers.com sale.

The Diapers.com acquisition suggests Amazon has its eye on B&N

The Diapers.com acquisition is pretty relevant when we consider whether Amazon will buy B&N.

NookColor puts B&N in a very interesting position -

1. If NookColor takes off then B&N is suddenly the Diapers.com of the color reading device segment.  
2. If NookColor doesn’t take off then B&N is the #2 eInk eReader maker that also happens to have a ton of stores Amazon can convert into Kindle Stores to sell Kindles, Color Kindles, Kindle Phones, and Kindle Tablets.
3. Managing to release Nook Color in the midst of a struggle for control of B&N shows that Mr. Riggio would be able to do very well if instead of easily swayed shareholders he had a ‘run this company however you want’ stakeholder like Mr. Bezos.

Amazon has let Zappos continue what it was doing and would probably let B&N continue to do what it wants to do – sell ebooks and eReaders – without distractions.

Amazon is probably waiting eagerly for any opportunity to take over B&N and it wouldn’t be a surprise if, in the next 9 to 12 months, it does exactly that. Kindle and Nook together would be huge while the presence of Sony Readers would ensure there were no DoJ concerns.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | amazon acquisition strategy, kindle strategy