As someone who has always been a little interested in e-book and e-paper technology, I've been following the raucous blogstorm that's surrounded Amazon's launch of their Kindle e-book reader last week. If you're not aware, it's a $399 white-shelled, black-and-white screened, portable e-book reader that can wirelessly download e-books, blogs, and magazines. Whatever it is, and whatever you call it - Amazon prefers "revolutionary wireless reading device" - it's definitely got a lot of people talking but very little of that talk has been kind to Bezos and team. Take, for instance, Seth's restrained disappointment or Scoble's vicious tough love.Now, I've not yet seen or used a Kindle myself, nor do I have a particularly strong desire to see or use a Kindle (wait, that's not right), so I've got no product review of my own to add to the pile. But some observations about the launch and market reaction do bubble up.
First, I think the Kindle launch shows without a doubt just how unforgivably high the standards are for a consumer tech product from a major company. Apple, primarily, has set the bar so high in design and usability that to follow in their footsteps with something that does not have a colour screen, a touch screen, a fashionable case, or direct integration into the mothership's main store (say, to buy paper books) is suicide. Amazon needed to come out of the gates with a knock-yer-socks-off game-changer and they obviously didn't. They needed a transcending idea, like what iMacs did to desktops in the late 90s or what iPhone and iTouch are doing to handhelds now, but instead they went with a collection of incremental innovations - some impressive, many not. It reminds me of that classic example of how Dick Fosbury forever changed competitive high jumping by throwing himself over the bar backwards rather than forwards. That was revolutionary because it set a new standard.
Secondly, I think we'll see Kindle become the unfortunate poster child of bad design - both tactile and user experience. Like I said, I've not held one myself but from the many reviews I've read the complaints mainly seem to be about value (price) and design. How and where and when and why somebody actually uses a product like this -- cellphone models soar or flop on this too -- is something absolutely essential to understand. Forget the tech if you've forgotten the human. And that leads to my third observation.
Shouldn't Amazon have a wealth of insight into how people actually read or how they buy books or how they want to interact with other readers? This should be their trump card. They should have been so far out in front of the critics -- and hey, they helped popularize user reviews, so they definitely should've known there would be critics and that they'd wield considerable influence -- that people would be saying "hey, what an insight!" and not "ugh, what an oversight!". Maybe they forgot about the value of insight, or perhaps the project team was too focused, too isolated within the organization (at Lab 126, a subsidiary), or too proud to get outside input that it led to something that didn't come together as a whole in the way that it should have. Who knows, maybe a more generalist approach might have helped.
In any case, hopefully Amazon will "fail forward", take the buckets of feedback constructively, and wow with v2. They've not made it easy for themselves though.