You have to admire the spunk of Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon.com).
Today, after the release of Amazon’s tablet, ‘Fire‘, he fired the opening salvo towards the heavily-fortified Apple castle with this quotable quote: ” There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.”
While it’s true that both companies ran perpendicular business models, the short-term future may see these two pioneering firms seeing eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe in the fast-evolving, streaming multimedia market.
Yep, Apple creates very elegant products that command premium prices. On the other hand, Amazon was only an accidental player in the cut-throat tech hardware market. Their only hit hardware product was the Kindle. And, they had no choice but to come up with it to augment their status as the number one digital book purveyor.
Recession-friendly priced at $199, middle-class Americans – who are already credit-pinched- will take a long hard look at Amazon’s Fire tablet before casting their fate to Apple’s uber-popular iPad.
If they feel the Fire didn’t scrimp on quality to achieve that $199 price tag, they might forego altogether that burning desire to get Apple’s iPad (which this author still believes, is really an over-sized, over-priced version of the iPod Touch…ho-hum, really nothing new in here except a lot of advertising superlatives).
After all, gadgets will still be gadgets while the $300 price discrepancy can feed a lot of homeless folks in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Only time, – and, maybe, apps – can tell if this Fire created by Amazon will be strong enough to generate the right amount of rain clouds to douse the scorching heat generated by Apple.