Joshua Gans watches the web giants battle it out:
What is remarkable is that a decade ago, Amazon, Google and Apple could not have looked further apart in the digital competition space. Amazon was invested in the physical world. Apple dabbled in online music and Google was in search. Now, they are inter-locked and in head-to-head competition from the cloud to the customer.
Joe Coscarelli thinks Amazon has "seriously undercut the Android tablet business, as well as the pricey Nook reader from Barnes and Noble, which saw its stock price drop during the Amazon announcement." Dan Lyons says some "analysts expect Amazon to introduce a bigger tablet, one more comparable to the iPad, sometime in the next year." Why Amazon decided to make hardware:
Although the decision to design and build its own hardware is a high-stakes bet, it’s equally true that Bezos had no choice but to enter the tablet business. About 40?percent of Amazon’s revenues comes from media—books, music, and movies—and those formats are rapidly going digital. Amazon was late to understand the speed of that transition; Apple, which launched the iPod in 2001 and iTunes two years later, wasn’t. The iPad has only strengthened Apple’s hold over digital media. There’s a Kindle app for the iPad, but Apple takes a 30?percent slice of all content that app makers sell on the tablet and has restricted Amazon from directing iPad users to its website in order to avoid giving Apple its cut. Doing business on the iPad threatens Amazon’s already thin profit margins.
(Chart via LikeCool)
The Dish 