.Dust

The recent arti­cle “Ama­zon invites devel­op­ers to come up with Apps for Kin­dle” led me to some more con­sid­er­a­tions on the rumored Apple tablet.

Let’s start with a quick recap of what Ama­zon announced last Thursday:

The Kin­dle Devel­op­ment Kit enables devel­op­ers to build active con­tent that lever­ages Kindle’s unique com­bi­na­tion of seam­less and invis­i­ble 3G wire­less deliv­ery over Ama­zon Whis­per­net, high-​resolution elec­tronic paper dis­play that looks and reads like real paper, and long bat­tery life of seven days with wire­less acti­vated. For exam­ple, Hand­mark is build­ing an active Zagat guide fea­tur­ing their trusted rat­ings, reviews and more for restau­rants in cities around the world, and Sonic Boom is build­ing word games and puzzles.

…

Start­ing next month, par­tic­i­pants in the lim­ited beta will be able to down­load the Kin­dle Devel­op­ment Kit, access devel­oper sup­port, test con­tent on Kin­dle, and sub­mit fin­ished con­tent. Those wait-​listed will be invited to par­tic­i­pate as space becomes avail­able. The Kin­dle Devel­op­ment Kit includes sam­ple code, doc­u­men­ta­tion, and the Kin­dle Sim­u­la­tor, which helps devel­op­ers build and test their con­tent by sim­u­lat­ing the 6-​inch Kin­dle and 9.7-inch Kin­dle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.

[via Ama­zon press release]

This is what almost every sin­gle Kin­dle owner was expect­ing and it really opens up a world of pos­si­bil­i­ties for the Kindle.

Going through the press release I think that a few ques­tions arise naturally:

• Who is going to pay for all of the data traf­fic gen­er­ated by appli­ca­tions over the 3G net­work? As of today the traf­fic gen­er­ated by the kin­dle itself may be con­sid­ered quite low, but when you start play­ing with great appli­ca­tions the game changes dra­mat­i­cally. From what I have read on the web it seems that an appli­ca­tion may not con­sume more that 100 Kbytes of data per month and that any addi­tional Mbyte will be charged to the devel­oper at 15 cent USD (?!?). More details on that here.
• There will be an appli­ca­tion store? We may assume it will be the Ama­zon Store.
• Will third party appli­ca­tion be allowed to charge the cus­tomers for addi­tional ser­vices as it hap­pen with the Apple in app purchase?
• If the devel­oper will be allowed to sell it’s appli­ca­tion which will be the rev­enue share model?

If you look at these ques­tions you can eas­ily under­stand that the answer to these ques­tion will define the suc­cess of the ini­tia­tive for Ama­zon and have already made the suc­cess of Apple.

It is quite clear that with these ques­tions on the table the Ama­zon Kin­dle SDK is no threat at all to Apple iPhone or what­ever Apple will come up with in the next few weeks.

We may also want to con­sider this SDK announce­ment from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. When we hear about a new mobile SDK release we all think to the Apple announce­ment. We will all be able to cre­ate cool appli­ca­tions on a neat device. Maybe what Ama­zon is try­ing to do here is to open up the Kin­dle to a very spe­cific set of appli­ca­tions that will be able to lever­age the Kin­dle pecu­liar­i­ties: e-​ink dis­play, bat­tery life, fan­tas­tic read­abil­ity, etc. If you ques­tion me about what kind of appli­ca­tions these would be, well, I have no answers right now.

What Ama­zon has done has also much deeper implications.

While I was vis­it­ing CES in Las Vegas I have seen dozens of eBook read­ers. From the very last Chi­nese man­u­fac­turer to the most impor­tant hard­ware man­u­fac­ture. I may have be miss­ing some­thing but from none of them I heard the word SDK.

This basi­cally means that the bat­tle­field for eBook read­ers has rapidly changed. The eBook need to be able to read books but it MUST be open to appli­ca­tions. We are shift­ing the prod­uct to a dif­fer­ent use bring­ing it closer to a tablet device.

Once again Apple has pushed a shift in the indus­try and Ama­zon has acknowl­edged the fact that in order to sur­vive to the upcom­ing “what­ever tablet from Apple” they need to cre­ate a com­plete ecosys­tem around their product.

With this recent announce­ments Ama­zon has started to cre­ate an ecosys­tem and that’s fine. If we com­pare that ecosys­tem with Apple we can notice that there are at least two crit­i­cal ele­ments miss­ing: retail stores and the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in the retail store.

Let’s try another approach and look at Google. They already had a great ecosys­tem in the cloud but they were miss­ing the hard­ware. Now they lined up the Nexus 1 mobile phone and they are going to play a very sim­i­lar game Apple and Ama­zon will play, or are play­ing now.

Same is doing Microsoft, even if not directly but with partnerships.

The tech­nol­ogy is now there, and it’s going to be cheaper and cheaper (apart from Apple, but that’s a dif­fer­ent story). The ecosys­tems have to be built and not each ecosys­tem may prove to be sta­ble enough in the long run, but it is now clear that the war is no more on how cool your prod­uct is but on how you will be able to attract devel­op­ers, pro­vid­ing cus­tomers with great prod­uct and ser­vices and mak­ing them feel home when they use your device.

The bat­tle­field in now in the User Expe­ri­ence and in the Devel­op­ers Community.

User Expe­ri­ence. I am con­vinced that this is the most impor­tant thing you should look at while design­ing your prod­uct. As I said, tech­nol­ogy is there, but Eser Expe­ri­ence is not there for most ven­dors out there.

Devel­op­ers Com­mu­nity. Every­body in the indus­try will be try­ing to attract devel­op­ers on their side. The are lot of one man band out there that develop great and cool prod­ucts and you want those guys to be on your side in this bat­tle. How do you attract them?

In the first place you may want to make your SDKs as cool and sim­ple as pos­si­ble. Pro­vide them with all the tools they need: IDEs, emu­la­tors, what­ever will make the devel­oper life easy. Then try to offer a decent way to mar­ket their prod­uct in your Appli­ca­tion Store, and, finally, show them the money.

A good ques­tion to answer would be: what role will have mobile telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions operators?

I have my opin­ion on this, but this will come in another post.

Related posts:

1. Tech­nol­ogy is there
2. De-​mystifying the tech­nol­ogy of emotion
3. Apple iPhone Con­firmed For T-​Mobile In Germay
4. The art of possibility
5. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone