Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
They paid a LOT of money for MobiPocket; they must have had a good reason to spend all that money.
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Haha, you must not have worked for a big company before
In the 1980's AT&T shut down their wireless division because they saw no money in cell phones. Of course 10 years later everybody was buying cell phones, so they spent billions to buy a company to get back into the cell market, when AT&T themselves had developed a huge chunk of the underlying technology.
Amazon is no AT&T and I do expect this to run some kind of version of Mobi. It will be to Amazon's credit if it is the standard version of mobi that can read content from any mobi retailer.
If it is a "fixed" version that requires the book be sold by Amazon, then I think they are going down the same road that Gemstar (and now Sony) went down. Gemstar was a disaster. Sony is already leaking that they are very dissappointed in their ereader sales so I believe they will dump their reader within 12 to 18 months.
Amazon may face the same fate a couple of years from now if they make the same mistake of closing off their system to other retailers.
The only thing that gives me hope is that Amazon did not stop other retailers from selling mobi when they acquired mobi. Also, Amazon does allow many other merchants to sell off the amazon store, so they may be open minded about this.
We should know in a few hours.