Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The Amazon Kindle e-reader has been getting great publicity since it
was first launched in November 2007. Yet it is hard to understand why
Amazon has hampered its global distribution by tying its capabilities
to a mobile phone network. Isn't the Internet good enough?
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made no secret of the
fact that he would like the Kindle to be the iPhone of e-readers.
That's great Jeff, except the Kindle is not a phone. What worked for
Apple is not necessarily appropriate for Amazon.
To my mind at least, the function of an e-reader is to store reading
material. The best and cheapest medium for downloading reading material
- any material - is the Internet, whether that's through a mobile phone
network, wireless hot spot or hard-wired service.
Why on earth anyone with a fantastic online retail service like Amazon
and a promising new product like Kindle would want to go through the
hassles of dealing with mobile phone carriers on a country by country
basis is beyond me. With the iPhone, Steve Jobs and Apple had no choice
but to do that. With the Kindle, Amazon simply doesn't need to.
If Jeff Bezos and Amazon want to take a lead from another company, they
should look to Asus and the Eee PC. Within days of releasing the
innovative new netbooks they were flying off the shelves. Now, released
around the same time as Kindle, millions of Eee PCs have been sold and
they're in stores all over the world.
Right now, if reports are to be believed, a few hundred thousand
Kindles have been sold in the US. The reports also say that even in the
US it's hard to get hold of a Kindle because you can only get them
through Amazon and they're often out of stock.
What should be happening is that some Chinese, Taiwanese or whatever
manufacturer should be producing Kindles with wireless capability by
the millions. Users should be able to download stuff to them via the
Internet through Amazon and a range of other suppliers. Why make things
difficult?
If Bezos wants to maintain a tightly knit relationship and
compatibility between Kindle and the Amazon store that's fair enough.
Amazon is after all the 800 pound gorilla of the online retailing and
books business. However, you don't need a special exclusive
relationship with a particular mobile phone operator gumming up the
works.
Personally, I would be quite happy to buy a Kindle if it was cheap
enough through Amazon or my local computer shop. I certainly wouldn't
want to buy one on a plan from my phone company - one phone plan is
quite enough forme thanks.
If Amazon is really serious about making the Kindle e-reader a
mainstream product then it's about time it gave the world a chance to
see whether all the hype is justified or just a bunch of e-vapourware.
Hey, Amazon has just released Kindle 2. Who cares? Most of us never got a chance to see Kindle 1.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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