Image by Brian Sawyer via Flickr
The future of Amazon looks bright.
As we get into the new year, it's important to take a look back to see what changes have happened in the past year. In the tech world, the passing of Steve Jobs was a monumental event. It has many experts wondering about the future of Apple and wondering if someone else will be able to step in and take some of the giant's market share.
The biggest threats to Apple are Google, Facebook and surprisingly, Amazon. But wait - isn't Amazon a bookstore? Yes, it is. However, it is also becoming a huge tech company to watch. Over the past year, they have quietly been putting in place an infrastructure that will turn them into a tech company - and one with the potential to be a giant killer.
At the beginning of the year, they introduced Amazon Prime. It's a paid annual membership that offers free shipping and many other perks. Over the year, the perks have grown and now include unlimited streaming video from their Prime library and a Kindle e-book lending library. Their selection of content keeps growing and will soon rival the Netflix catalog. Not to mention, at $79 a year, it is a less expensive option, even before Netflix raised their prices and lost a portion of their content.
The Kindle lending library was an incredibly smart move, as the biggest competitor to the Kindle is Barnes and Noble's Nook. One of the Nook's key selling points is that you can share a limited number of books with your friends. Although the number of loanable e-books are small, many people want to have to option to read books for free. With the Lending Library, Kindle users can borrow books directly from Amazon, without having to have a friend willing to loan their book. Right now, the service is free with a Prime membership and only allows users to borrow one book a month, however that is likely to change as people use it more.
In addition to these changes, the company has also become one of the largest cloud computing companies. Amazon Web Services is huge and shows no signs of stopping. By making cloud computing accessible to everyone it helps both large and small companies build rich websites that can expand to meet larger demands as they grow. In fact, websites like Netflix and Reddit are built by Amazon and if you start looking into creating a website for your business, the odds are good that you'll end up using the Amazon platform.
At the beginning of the year, it was clear that Amazon was working on something but it was hard to see how all of these things could possibly tie in. Now, with last month's release of the Kindle Touch and more impressive, the Kindle Fire, it is more clear. The Kindle Fire is an Android tablet that retails for a shockingly low price of $199. Although some people have called it a cheap version of the iPad, it's certainly not that.
The Kindle Fire wasn't designed to compete with the iPad at all. In fact, there are much better tablets on the market that are more competitive to the iPad. What the Kindle Fire is excellent at is delivering Amazon content. This means that for those who have the Kindle Fire, they can have books, magazines, newspapers, movies and more delivered to their tablet easily. Amazon actually sells the tablet for less than the cost to make, knowing that they will make up the difference in sales of Amazon content.
It seems as though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been taking the long view when it comes to business and instead of trying to compete, they have been excelling at innovating and making their own path. Let's not forget that when Amazon was created, it was with the goal of changing the way that people buy books. I think that they have more than accomplished that, and have moved on by changing the way we do everything.
In short, I believe that Amazon is a company on the rise.
What do you think? Do you have a Kindle Fire? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for TechCareersBlog and Nexxt. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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