Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
don't consider myself a god who can inhabit the minds of all of Amazon's customers (except perhaps my own).
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Bezos does.
Look, Amazon only does things they think will bring them money.
(Duh, right?)
And, having *spent* money on something, they will look to monetize the investment in as many ways as possible. (That is how they got into hosted web services business, after all.)
Their moves always make sense in hindsight but not always in the same way as they would for other companies. They are hardly the first or last tablet platform to come with an onboard office suite. That does not mean they are going corporate in any big way and if the WSJ wants to read it that way they can. Won't make it true. Palm used to sell thousands of PDAs to corporations. For a year or two. It never amounted to much on either side.
Selling platforms to the corporate world is a very hard thing and just putting a couple of apps on a piece of consumer hardware does not make for a corporate product. The State Dept contract Amazon negotiated? That was for a literacy outreach program, not any real line of business mission.
Amazon has done a few things that are useful and necessary to get into corporate sales but those things are not yet sufficient to gain them corporate credibility. In fact, with corporate evaluation and testing cycles running as long as they do, the HDX line will be on clearance by the time any volume contract can be put in place. Amazon plays a long game and they clearly have corporate in mind but the whole Kindle business model for the next year or three is still ebooks, media, and games. That's where the money comes in.
Now, in three years they might partner with a big computing services contractor like Boeing to sell a few thousand HDX3's to a few sites but the glass house gang is not going to be preordering Kindle tablets by the thousands next week. At a minimum they're going to wait on ZDNet and the other corporate media to see if they even need to start thinking of Amazon in the corporate hardware space.
They might get a few onesie, twosie "corporate" sales but the Amazon tablets are still very much consumer appliances.