Quick - what operating system does your car run? It is likely to have a few dozen microprocessors controlling the engine, transmission, stability control, interior climate, the entertainment system and so on. There may well be a few operating systems, but you probably don't know or care.
Perhaps that question is a bit too difficult. Try this one. What operating system does your kindle use? Do you care?
The Kindle is a very specialized device that happens to be a pretty good ebook reading platform that pretty much fails at nearly everything else. It also happens to be very successful for Amazon - a vending machine for books in your hands with a very convenient mechanism for buying and reading books. It has been changing what many of us think of when we read a "book".
People are reporting that Amazon will release a Kindle tablet soon and a few people claim have even played with advanced pre-production models and reported. A not too fantastic 7”color screen, 6 GB of memory, a nice interface for access to some Amazon store functions and inexpensive at a rumored $250.
Oh - and it runs Android
The last statement, combined with Amazon’s success with the black and white Kindle, and the device's low price has people projecting this is the end of the iPad’s reign.
Perhaps it makes sense to take a deeper look.
The caveat is that I haven’t played with a Kindle tablet. I do have a lot of experience with a black and white Kindle, Amazon, iOS devices and Apple.
First it is reasonable to think about what a tablet is - or perhaps what it isn’t. Apple and Microsoft started serious work on tablet more than a decade ago. The Microsoft version was basically a Windows machine with a pen based interface that was mostly frustrating. In theory it was enormously capable, but it failed badly and only saw use in a few niche markets. I tried to use a few over the years and found the user experience to be terrible.
Apple waited a decade before they felt their tablet was ready. Along the way they saw the opportunity to make a phone, but technology wasn't ready for their version of a tablet. Compared to a PC the iPad lacks flexibility for some, but it has a good user interface as well as a good user experience. The interface is good enough that there is a strong illusion that you are manipulating physical objects on the screen with your fingers. Battery life is good, the price is good enough for many people, there is a rich and easy to use application market along with thousands and thousands of inexpensive applications and it is a very nice portable platform for personally viewed video and audio. It also has a best in class web browser and a nice email client. Some, but not all, people are finding it has become their primary platform. The combination of its features make it more flexible than a PC for these folks.
An amazing feature of Apple as a company, and one that few engineering companies share, is their omission of features from a device. Simplicity is valued and the user experience is their gold standard.
Apple also controls a good deal of the hardware and software in their devices. Getting the user experience right, at least at this point in technology, demands an intimate marriage of hardware and software. This approach greatly limits variation in hardware and software as some of the software is extremely hardware dependent. Other competing approaches sometimes abstract the hardware using the idea of a process virtual machine, but this introduces inefficiency which means you need more powerful and power hungry processors to do a task. If you have to pay attention to battery life and it means the user experience is often lacking.
Amazon has taken a relatively early version of Android and “forked it” - they take a copy of it and then build and modify it making it their own. It is unlikely they would do this again for a later version of Android and none of the newer features of Android will work on it. The important thing is Amazon probably doesn’t care. They probably will only have a few versions of their tablet at most and this allows them to tightly control the hardware and software. The device appears to be fairly limited, so it should be possible to provide a good user experience at a low price. And who will care what operating system it runs anyway?
A major question is what this means for third parties. In many ways the Amazon Kindle is even more of a walled garden than Apple’s iOS devices. I’m very curious to see if Amazon allows third party bookstores, music stores and app stores on the Kindle Tablet. Will they provide a robust software development kit for third party developers? Will the developers have deep access to the device? Will Amazon change their policy of setting prices and writing descriptions for Android apps for Kindle apps..? The list goes on and on.
If they do allow third party apps there may be a major disruption of the Android market - at least the tablet market. There are currently a large number of Android phones in user's hands, and essentially no tablets. Few people are making a profit on Android apps. The variation in Android hardware and software has introduced a fragmentation into the ecosystem. It is difficult and often expensive to write a piece of non-trivial software and ensure that it runs well on most of the devices. There is software that only runs a few devices. There is also the issue that Android users have a history of not spending very much money for an application.
If Amazon sells a boatload of Kindles - a $250 color book reader that also is good for streaming Amazon video and music is likely to be very popular - and if they support software development, app development shops will have to ask the question if they will support another version of Android - one that is very different from current versions. Perhaps what they will really be considering if this becomes very successful is do they support this and forget Android tablets.
Let me rephrase that
The Kindle tablet effectively runs a different operating system from any of the Android tablets - at least as far as developers are concerned. The early fork ensured that. There is a historical connection - it is like the family tree for humans - considerable evolution has taken place.
iOS is OSX which is based on BSD Unix and the Mach kernel. I can make a program that will compile and run on a vanilla BSD machine and it will also compile and run on Macbook, but this will be a very primitive program that would interest almost no one.
What Amazon has done is fascinating. They aren’t competing with the Android hardware makers trying to create a tablet that will somehow out iPad the iPad. What they have done is to make something that leverages their own platform. This is a Kindle that is a vastly improved vending machine of Amazon services and happens to be inexpensive and perhaps good enough that you’ll want one for yourself. It also has the potential of gathering a lot of information for Amazon, but that remains to be seen.
You’ll probably also want an iPad - they are going to be vastly different niches of the space of possible tablets. The successful ones will include much more beyond hardware and software. There will be a rich ecosystem attached to them.
Hardware manufactures who don’t recognize this and can’t participate in a desirable ecosystem will probably beat each other up in the race to the bottom - just like the Wintel world.
Amazon and Apple may well be competing, but it is unlikely at the tablet level.
Yeah - I can't play Angry Birds on my Audi's ECS either ...
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