Yes, but we're staying polite.
Don't want to drift into emotional irrelevancies and get the thread closed.
This news is significant in a lot of subtle ways.
One that jumps at me is that the State Dept bought onto Kindle, not for the hardware or the commercial ebooks, but for the backend services. Yes, they want to read ebooks on the things. *But* they also want the document management and device management services that Kindle offers. (Remember the flap over 1984? Well, that is a *feature* that a government or corporate reader device *has* to have.)
The government signed up for a document distribution system that just happens to use Kindles (not smartphones, not tablets, not PCs).
And that is a clear shot across the bow at a lot of players in books *and* in PCs.
Microsoft had better take notice. Clearcase is getting Tablet integration with Windows 8 but they need to be thinking in terms of dedicated reader devices, too. In the corporate environment, $100 *secure* document viewers will find a lot of uses if supported by the proper backend systems.
Makes me wonder if that is one reason for Microsoft investing in NewCo and whether they might want to buy it outright once it's split off from B&N.
The ebook evolution isn't going to stop with recreational reading. There's more to come.