We should put the phrase iPad killer to bed. Various posts across the web are titled with “Kindle Fire is a potential iPad killer”, “Amazon fires up its iPad-fighter” and “Kindle Fire Tablet Will Torch iPad”. Let’s put some sense into this discussion; a good way to look at this would be to compare them to cars, would you say a Nissan Micra is a competitor to Bugatti Veyron; yes they are both cars & yes the iPad & Kindle Fire are both tablets, does that really make them in direct competition with each other? Can you see where I’m heading? The target market for both products is completely different much like the potential driver for each of these cars is completely different.
Quite simply the target user for the Kindle Fire will be someone who is interested in browsing the web, consuming some content, and probably will already know of the existing Kindle. Amazon have already highlighted these people as their aimed market and the unlimited movies offering, cloud music player and using the success of the previous Kindle is a great way to entice these people in. It also falls quite well into impulse buy territory and nicely into gift budgets.
To further fuel the Fire, Amazon knows that they are in a different part of the market to the iPad which will only aide to their success. As CEO Jeff Bezos said in a message to customers:
There are two approaches to the tablet market, and both can work. Apple has chosen one (feature-rich, powerful, high-end hardware tightly integrated with a formidable content ecosystem) and Amazon the other: (spartan, feature-limited hardware tightly integrated with a formidable content ecosystem).
In a market that is already dominated in the high end by the iPad, come November 15th with Amazon’s mass of content and aggressive pricing strategy, it looks extremely likely the low end will have it’s dominant tablet too and the other manufactures should be extremely worried about what space will remain for them.