Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Just don't be too quick to bury them.
So yes, they're way late to the party and don't (yet) offer us any compelling reason to deal with them. But they aren't necessarily D.O.A. If nothing else, they support ePub and aren't Amazon. In some circles that is enough. 
It might be enough to get them 5% of the market in a year or two. Which ain't peanuts. And it would make them a clear number three.
People keep hoping for an alternative to Amazon; well, here's one.
Edit:
By the way, people like to wave off MS as some tech has-been and are missing how they are quietly growing into new and very profitable areas with top of the line tech. If anything, their core competencies in tools and services have them extremely well positioned for the next wave of change in the ever changing computer world. They are already coleaders, with AWS, in Cloud services. And they keep adding to their services toolkit. Edge is one of the keys.
And there are forces at work that play right to their strengths and positioning.
Consider these two recent pieces:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/android...oned-platform/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/siri-yo...nal-assistant/
The second one might seem like a seasonal joke but if you stop to consider Apple's backburner-ing of the Mac in favor of the iThings, to the point some are calling for them to spinoff the Mac to let it compete properly as a standalone business, there is merit in the idea. Apple has allowed its computing side to fall too far behind the leading edge to catch up any time soon. And if they don't team up with Microsoft, Amazon will. And are...
Bottom line, those dirt cheap WinTabs might come in very handy for Edge ebooks if the Oracle ruling sticks. |
Despite my use of Linux, I've never been anti-Microsoft. In recent years Microsoft has done very well with some things, not so well with others. Its position in cloud services alone is not to be dismissed lightly and must be bringing them a nice revenue stream. However, to me this initiative is too close to the Windows Phone strategy, which has proved a failure. They were just too far behind IOS and Android, particularly in availability of apps. From all accounts the product was quite good. Just far too late to market and not enough differentiating features to make people want to swap platforms. To me the book store seems like a case of deja vu. Of course, though this may come as a shock to some, I have been wrong before and it is possible that I will even be wrong again. If Microsoft is prepared to persevere, pump money into it and expand its availability, including new products of its own, it is not inconceivable that it will succeed to some degree. Or perhaps Microsoft want only to pick the low hanging fruit, as pwalker said of Apple, I think accurately.
The Oracle ruling is an extensive topic in itself, worthy of its own thread. I thought the author of the zdnet article you linked to was in full panic mode. The views expressed reminded me of SCO and its Linux licenses. This will be an interesting one to watch, as the implications could be very significant indeed. Most interesting is that Google is in fact working on a replacement OS. The problem is, of course, apps. If Google introduce a new OS which won't run all or a large proportion of existing apps, then there could be a significant opportunity for Microsoft. And, of course, if Microsoft can again attract a significant share of the phone market then even its ebook store may derive significant benefits. But there are an awful lot of ifs. Based on the situation at the moment the most likely outcome at best for MS, at least in my opinion, is that it captures the "low lying fruit".