Quote:
Originally Posted by BVLarson
The truth is they are not very technical at Amazon. As an author and dev, I've seen it at every step of the way. It is a marketing-driven company from the top down and they don't have any idea how to handle a tech device. That said, they probably don't want to have to deal with scanning for ad bots and hijackers on their kindles, and want to keep their device in the "consumer electronics" category to make things ez and simple for users. In other words, they like to pretend the kindle is not a computer.
-bvl
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It is probably a mistake to view Amazon as a large monolithic company with a well-defined corporate culture. If you look at their help-wanted sections, or at their orgchart, you will find that they are a conglomeration of fairly autonomous subsidiaries doing a wide variety of different things with locations all over the US. Most of the kindle work is done out of a subsidiary called lab126 located in Cupertino, California, and is by all accounts quite a normal silicon valley tech operation.
Amazon's success with the kindle last year has sparked several competitors to enter their market, along with the big publishers attempting to alter the business model with agency pricing for electronic books.
This in turn has prompted Amazon to retune its strategic model -- most recently articulated by Jeff Bezos in a Fortune magazine interview as "buy once read everywhere". The focus has turned to facilitating the reading of eBooks on as many platforms as possible. They have also repositioned the kindle product line at "serious" readers (whatever that means). Save for some repricing actions on the K2 and KDX, they have not yet shown their hand as to the future of the kindle.
Whatever that future might be, I assume that apps and an app store are bound up with it. The KDK is not overly complex, and in the kindle store, they already have one of the best eRetailing operations this side of the galactic core
). So the delay I guess is one of timing and strategic considerations rather than any operational or technical difficulties