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[Updated after the Kindle Fire launch event: I've noted what happened in italics. I've not made any other edits.]

Tomorrow Amazon holds a major launch event and will likely unveil its first tablet, according to Techcrunch named the Kindle Fire.

To date, everyone bar Apple has failed with tablet launches. If Amazon mimics Apple then its tablet will fail too. Apple has too many economies of scale, industrial design expertise and supplier relationships for a retail-centric company like Amazon to emulate. Especially, if the Amazon tablet has taken a fast route to market by using the same ODM hardware manufacturer as RIM .

To succeed, Amazon must, and I’m sure will, take a different approach. The success of the Kindle shows Amazon is prepared to think differently from others and to disrupt its own products — in the Kindle’s case to disrupt the cash cow of print book sales — in order to be innovative and seize early advantage in digital markets. If Amazon’s hardware is undifferentiated and virtually the same as RIM’s PlayBook then Amazon has to differentiate elsewhere with content, experience and business models. Otherwise it will suffer the same fate as RIM’s PlayBook.

Amazon cares little about the post-PC world, unlike Apple and Microsoft who are playing that different game. Instead, Amazon is driven by a post disc and post print world where all media will be digital.

Amazon will build a true media tablet. The first true media tablet. The Kindle tablet will focus on the future of all media — TV, movies, music, books, magazines — to enable Amazon to become the dominant digital media retailer. That is Amazon’s ambition.

On that basis, here are the areas to watch for in Amazon’s tablet product launch and what impact each item will have  on the market:

• The extent to which the Kindle tablet’s business model is content-subsidized. Few devices enjoy a lower up front price because of content subsidy. It’s hard to do. Games consoles are the obvious exception but even in that market history is awash with console failures. Nintendo’s 3DS is the most recent struggler. Outside of games almost all devices are priced without a content subsidy. Even Apple sees content revenues as icing rather than a key profit centre that would warrant a lower up front price for iPads or iPhones. Carriers too subsidise iPhones based on communication revenues, not media. Arguably, only Amazon’s own Kindle eReader has extended a content-led device sales model outside of the games market. If Amazon offers its tablet for a very low price, based on expectations of future content sales, then Amazon will successfully disrupt the market and enjoy very significant sales. If the price is tied to hardware costs, then the price will be less aggressive and Amazon’s tablet will compete at a similar price to rivals and consumers will judge it based on the overall product package.
  Update post Fire launch event: Price is just $199 which given the component quality (IPS color screen; dual core processor; same broad hardware as the much more expensive PlayBook etc.) looks to have been set based on expectation of future Amazon content sales.  Read the rest of this entry »

This week the first significant feature update to Windows Phone 7 should roll out to users’ phones. Or perhaps it will be next week, Microsoft is being vague. Either way, this should be a reason for Microsoft to market the hell out of their innovative and worthy smartphones.  Instead, the world is being distracted by Windows 8 and competitor activity, rather than the update variously called Mango or version 7.5. Microsoft is at risk of presenting multiple personalities to the world.

“We haven’t sold quite as many as I would have liked in the first year… I’m not saying I love where we are but I am very optimistic on where we can be. We’ve just got to kick this thing to the next level.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO,  at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, September 14, 2011.

To date, Windows Phone hasn’t sold as well as Microsoft hoped and wanted. Microsoft really needs Mango to succeed or Windows Phone 7 may itself stagnate and eventually die, despite its highly differentiated social network integration, hubs, and Metro user interface (UI).

The use by Windows 8 of the same Metro interface pioneered on Windows Phone 7 should boost adoption of Microsoft’s smartphones. By confirming Microsoft backing for the Metro UI it should help app developers to create apps for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Having more quality apps should then boost Windows Phone sales. It’s the classic virtuous circle.

And Windows Phone really needs more apps, and more quality apps too: as of September 2011 there are just over 32,000 apps available compared with over 425,000 for Apple’s iOS; over 250,000 for Android; even the iPad has over 90,000 apps in Apple’s App Store.

This virtuous circle won’t happen unless Microsoft amends its strategy.

Read the rest of this entry »

BlackBerry-maker RIM is struggling following some terrible recent results. It’s now under pressure to hasten the launch of next generation BlackBerry smartphones.

RIM must resist and instead execute better.

The most shocking part of those results was the performance of the PlayBook tablet. Just 200,000 shipped in its second quarter on sale, under half the 500,000 in its first quarter.  This has scared observers as the PlayBook is RIM’s first next generation product of many in a major product transition that will transform RIM’s entire range. The PlayBook is built on the same QNX OS foundation that will power future BlackBerry smartphones.

The PlayBook’s failure clearly demonstrates why speed of delivery, at the expense of quality execution, is the wrong strategy for RIM now despite the pressure:

• The Playbook attempted to go head to head with the iPad by focusing on a media-centric experience, with Flash support, video output to a TV set and elegant multitasking. This diversification spread RIM’s R&D efforts too thin for a company attempting to do three major things: defend its core markets; evolve its old product range; as well as building a completely new set of products using QNX OS.
• RIM failed to appeal to its existing communication-centric customers. For corporates, the PlayBook lacked integration with BES and any native email capability. For young consumers, typically Curve owners, the PlayBook lacked BlackBerry Messenger.

The drop in RIM’s overall device shipments isn’t surprising and shouldn’t lead to a change in strategy. While quarterly device shipments were 10.6 million, down 1.5 million from the equivalent quarter in 2010, they were 2.3 million higher than the same quarter in 2009. RIM remains profitable. In the circumstances, given the complete product portfolio-wide transition that RIM’s largest customers — operators and enterprises — know is about to happen this is a pretty good holding action.

RIM is about to start a major product transition from smartphones based on an evolution of the original BlackBerry software to the new QNX phone operating system that also powers the PlayBook tablet. These kinds of product transitions are hard to do, are always risky, and always threaten to undercut sales of old generation products. Analogous product switches show how hard it is to do:

Read the rest of this entry »

Switching a vast company’s strategy takes time. Stephen Elop may have announced the jump from Symbian to Windows Phone smartphones back in February, but there are numerous smaller decisions that need to be made too: how departments should be organised, who does what, which products stay, which are delayed, which are killed off. Steve Jobs followed a similar path when he returned to Apple. It’s hard work.

Today, CTO Rich Green steps down for personal reasons. We won’t know what those really are because they are, well, personal. It could be as the rumours suggest a disagreement over strategy with regard to the high end MeeGo platform, it could be the stress of implementing so many changes so fast, it could truly be a personal family matter. They do happen outside of soaps.

But whatever,  the venture that Nokia embarked on first by appointing Elop as CEO last September, and then with the Windows Phone move is now too far along to retract.

Nokia is committed. Anyone at Nokia that thinks otherwise will only increase the chance that Elop’s bold courageous plan fail, and with it Nokia, by creating delay. The last thing that Nokia, and Nokia loyalists, needs now is more delay, more talk, or yet another shift in strategy.

Nokia has to ship Windows Phone devices in volume quickly to catch-up with Samsung, HTC, Apple and even and  most worryingly for Nokia to gain competitive parity on smartphones with the recently struggling Motorola and SonyEricsson.