Connectivity as a Utility and other news
There were two news items that made a huge impression on me this week.
The first was that Apple sales of Leopard exceeded sales of Vista in Japan in October. Apple has been a niche player for decades but this might be a turning point:
In the six days after Leopard’s 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan.
However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent
The second announcement that made a huge impression was the launch of Amazon’s eBook reader titled AmazonKindle. The gadget allows you to read digital books on digital paper. It costs $399 and you can choose from a library of 88.000 books.
The really impressive things about the Kindle however is the fact that is comes with an always-on wireless internet connection. At no extra cost. Without a subscription. It is just there.
This is incredible to me. A few years ago we still had to dial in. Then came DSL and Cable which meant we were always online. Then came wireless in the form of GPRS, later UMTS, and Wi-Fi. And now we are making the leap to standard, always-on, wireless and free internet.
In the future you will just be connected, always and everywhere and the whole notion of being on- or offline will be gone.
And with the Kindle the future just happened.
Besides that Loïs turned 6 on Friday and we celebrated her birthday, with 9 of her friends, on Saturday. That not only impressed me even more but also turned out to be pretty exhausting.
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Don’t you believe the DRM imposed with the Kindle will make the Kindle not popular?
You can’t do anything with the content you buy (which you also need to buy twice if you’ve also bought the paperback), can’t swap books, can’t create your own books easily. The internet is not too happy about the Kindle. All that and the fact that it’s fugly.
This is not “the iPod of books” as some people like to believe. For an eInk product to become popular I think they first need to work on the businessmodel and the DRM. eBooks should be cheap and easy to exchange with your computer including additional notes or other snippets.
@Arne: I have no idea if the Kindle will succeed. SO far I haven’t been very impressed with its looks, features and restrictions. But the facts that it is being offered with an always-on wireless internet connection is very interesting and will have an impact on our whole industry.
The features are boring but the phenomena is interesting….