Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie_w
I'm neither a Kindle user nor a note-taker but I find the user reactions to this Scribe very interesting.
Is it now acceptable to users that a company can take your money today for a device priced as a big screen annotating device whose annotating software isn't currently up to much but should be "better soon" without giving specific details of what "better" and "soon" actually mean?
Is there any company other than Amazon who could get away with this? 
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They haven't promised very much ('better Word integration'), and they only said that because they had pre-announced that specific feature. They have acknowledged that it is not everything they are shooting for. All before the launch. They aren't claiming it's better than the competition at this point. It's not a bait and switch.
And while Notebook features are lacking, what is there is stable and functional. The reading features are what every Kindle user is expecting. Was there even a post launch update? (I see Scribe is on 5.16.1, other Kindles are 5.15.1)
And as newcomers to the notebook market, what they're shooting for is not fixed in stone: critically, they need feedback from actual users to focus the deliverables in future updates.
Clearly holiday season was a fixed target. Some features weren't ready. That's perfectly ordinary. Software development is not as predictable as modifying an existing hardware design (Kindle). Some things that look easy take ten times longer, and the hard things usually remain hard. To meet a given ship date, you have to be prepared to have a minimally viable product ready to go and leave the rest for a future update. Almost all software development now is iterative and designed to facilitate this ability to meet deadlines with a viable release and not wait for everything originally on the feature backlog to be ready.
Apple for example announced and demonstrated new iPadOS features months before the expected release in the Fall. But not only did they not ship iPadOS 16.0, the first release was 16.1, a few weeks later. And only 16.2 finally delivered the rest of the features announced. I'm sure they would have liked it to be ready for 16.0 but had to adjust to the realities of software development.
Amazon is not going to share their strategic vision or feature roadmap for competitive reasons, and also out of respect for customers thinking of buying it, much less tell us when things will show up. The fact is, they don't know for sure.
Bezos was fond of saying 'stay tuned'.