Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyBob
It certainly is a failing of the Kindle device, from a consumer point of view. Anything that your product is inferior at, compared to the competitors' products, is a failing. It may be intentional, and it may be designed to boost sales of another another product (i.e. ebooks), and it may even be successful at it. But that doesn't mean it isn't a failing of the product being sold.
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"The consumer point of view?"
Which consumer?
Are you proposing that all consumers are interchangeable? Have the same needs, same tastes, same biases, same budgets?
Or are you proposing that products be designed to meet the needs of every last possible potential customer, include every last feature that any potential competitor might conceivably throw up on a specsheet?
Is a Porsche Cayenne failing because it doesn't offer the fuel economy of a Honda Fit or the manure-hauling capacity of a Dodge Ram? Is a Tesla failing because it offers a single speed transmission instead of five, six, or eight gears?
The beauty of open and competitive markets is that they allow for diversity in design and variety in features so that individual consumers get to choose for themselves what matters to them, what is useful to them, and not be stuck with whatever some "expert" somewhere decided was "necessary" and what was a "failing".
In open and competitive markets it doesn't take long to find out how many consumers think touchscreen UIs are more valuable than wireless access and how many are willing to pay for both; how many prefer grayscale eink and extreme battery life to color and hours of battery life, or vice-versa; how many care about annointed standards, how many care about library access, and how many prefer standalone devices that don't need a PC to acquire books.
So far, the open and competitive market seems to think the Kindle is anything but a failure and it is saying there is room for more than one vision of what an ebook reader should and shouldn't do.
Which is great, because the way things look right now, if there were only room for one ereader product in the market, that one product would more likely be a Kindle than a generic ADE reader.
Kindle is not going to magically vanish overnight anymore than Google or Apple or Microsoft is going to vanish. If anything, the Kindle ecosystem is on the ascendancy and headed for ubiquity.
Sometime this summer (if not sooner) Amazon is going to crow about selling more ebooks than print books combined; sometime this calendar year they'll announce they've sold tens of millions of Kindles worldwide. Anybody irritated by those posibilities had better stock up on antiacid.
