Amazon heading into Palm's trap?: My Twitter TL is filled with Amazon's smartphone entry rumor, and it makes me wonder.
I don't have Kindle Fire but my husband does, and this is all what he has told me - not my FIRST HAND experience, and I am not sure if it is just him. Please let me know if you have any insight about it.
He LOVED Kindle Fire at the beginning. He liked the price, size, weight, integration with Amazon account, and he started buying stuff from Amazon like crazy (I know for sure about it, because HE USED MY PRIME ACCOUNT!! o(｀ω´*)oﾌﾟﾝｽｶﾌﾟﾝｽｶ!!)
And a few months later, now, he says he is disappointed about it. He thinks that Amazon is not maintaining its software appropriately.
Maintaining OS (in this case, I am not sure if I can say OS, as it is based on Android, but Amazon version of it..) is a lot of work. He says that there are bugs here and there, but Amazon does not fix it quick enough. There has been no significant update either. He believes that the early OS is not stable and it has to be updated to fix bugs and add features in a timely manner, so that Amazon used all the resources just to launch the product and has not enough talent to maintain the OS.
If they are working on smartphone, it may be that everyone in Fire team got transplanted there, but it would exactly be the proof that Amazon does not have enough power to maintain their own OS and hardware.
It is a deja vu for me. Decades ago, I was an early Palm smartphone user (remember Visor?) and endured all the problems for a few years, until I finally gave up and switched to Blackberry. Palm did not have power to update their OS in time to fix all the problems. At that time, my industry friend who had business with RIM was telling me that even RIM was having problem maintaining OS, as it REALLY exhaust human resources.
Now that giants like Apple and Google are in the reign, Palm is long gone and RIM is getting out of breath. They cannot catch up anymore. So I am REALLY wondering if Amazon has big/good enough team to have this tough race going for an extended period of time, and otherwise, they may get into this Palm's trap again.
