Amazon Rallying Troops to Fight Against the iPad

By dag | May 18, 2010 | 3 comments

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Amazon is staffing up heavily to take on the iPad. Nick Bilton (New York Times blogger), noticed a flurry of new job openings at Lab126, the team behind the Kindle. 81 positions are currently offered at their Cupertino campus, less than a mile away from Apple’s headquarters.

The openings are for a variety of jobs, from packaging to design, but are mostly geared towards engineers, as Amazon is ramping up its teams to build the next generation of the Kindle, likely designed to become another “iPad killer”, with enhanced capabilities in order to play third party apps like games.

A question remains unanswered though: how long will it take Amazon to release its new device? Most analysts expect the next generation Kindle to be commercialized by early next year, which may be too late for Amazon to fight against Apple, and its large iPad installed base.

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About dag: Certified geek

http://www.sebastianhahn.de Sebastian

Waaaaaay too late.
http://www.pedalthrottlerepeat.com 2wheel_Ted

Unless it can give me back rub and vacuum the floor while being all things the iPad already is, this Amazon “iPad killer” is destined to be another iPad also-ran in the crowd.

To be fair, Amazon does have their digital download music store, Kindle bookstore and Amazon Video on-demand service. On paper, that’s on par with Apple’s online content services so they do have the offerings to support an iPad-like product. Will developers flock to this format to fill an Amazon app store that competes with the Apple App Store? Doubtful.

Regardless, whatever they’re designing–or rather, hiring designers and engineers to create–still has to be on par with or surpass what next year’s iPad can do. Apple not only has a head start with real market penetration, but likely with new features and functionality planned for the next iPad rev.

The iPad wasn’t first out of the gate, but set the benchmark as the first to achieve broad adoption and become the benchmark for success in this category. Apple is to the tablet industry/market as Lance Armstrong was to the Tour de France in the early 2000s. For everyone else, it’s a race for second place.
Ric

No way they’ll be able to compete. By the time they ramp up, Apple will be well into v2.0 of the iPad. No way they can provide a better user experience.