[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

As you also pointed out, MS needs to alter that situation in order to continue to grow, and they're obviously trying to do so (witness the Zune... not that that's a great device, it just demonstrates their effort to penetrating the recreational consumer market).

They have to significantly penetrate the Indian and/or Chinese markets, or they have to hit a home run with something like the Zune, or both.

I'm not counting them out. The Xbox gaming division is finally starting to contribute to revenues, and they are certainly trying hard at search.

Point of order: The Ballmer quote didn't actually say that "PCs are best for reading." In response to the question of whether MS would build a dedicated device, Ballmer said No, because they already make a device for reading e-books which is "the most popular device in the world": The PC. This point may be debatable, but frankly, why bother? It's very popular. And it can read e-books in lots of formats. 'Nuff said.

Agreed, and a lot of folks do. Consider the folks who buy O'Reilly's tech books: chances are very high that they read them on a PC in one window or screen while working on the program/language/OS the book covers in another. That's not the sort of thing you normally read on a dedicated reader.

I think it's already been established that the PC is not necessarily the best device for reading e-books, just as we have failed to establish what device is the "best"... it is clear that "best" is in the eye of the beholder.

So, maybe we should be debating instead Ballmer's suggestion that they do not need to build a dedicated reader... does anyone think MS could do a better job with a dedicated e-book reader to further e-book reading than is being done by other readers, or by existing MS software?

I'm sure Microsoft could do just about anything they chose to.

But in this case, i would reduce to two questions:

1) Just what would be a better dedicated reader?

Given the disagreements here over what a reader should be/do, I don't see a clear cut answer to that question.

2) Is the market big enough to make it worth Microsoft's while to bother?

I think the answer here is a clear cut No.

Microsoft is a big company. It needs to sell a lot of what it makes to justify doing it at all. Even if Microsoft decided to build a dedicated reader, I don't think they could sell enough at a high enough price to justify the effort.

Microsoft top management is essentially conservators of other people's money. Their job is to determine where to invest corporate funds to achieve the best returns. Something like the Zune is a reasonable bet because almost everybody might get an MP3 player. Look at the contribution the iPod made to Apple's success.

A dedicated reader is far more of a niche market item. I don't see the potential return on investment being big enough to interest them.

Ballmer mentioned in the interview that he'd love to see a PC app allowing users to read Amazon content on the PC, and I'm in full agreement with that (especially if said content could be ported into your portable device of choice once it's in your PC). I'd also love to see OEB alternatives to the PC: Digital Editions works, but is proprietary, does not run well on older or lesser-powered devices, and presently encourages non-compliant ePub files.

We might see such a thing. I think it depends upon where Amazon sees long term benefits.

My own feeling is that for Amazon, it's about the books. They are already the 800lb gorilla in book retailing. eBooks are a pure win for them. They have the infrastructure already developed to let customers shop and place orders over the web. With eBooks, they get to sell product without warehousing and distribution costs. I wasn't surprised in retrospect when an app for the iPhone came out that would let users buy and read Kindle editions. The iPhone is hugely popular, and the volume of ebooks sales it would generate would more than compensate for possible lost Kindle sales because the user could use their iPhone instead.
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Dennis