The Kindle wasn't an iPhone, and Bezos wasn't Jobs| taoran observed

In a sense, the Kindle is an innovation that is not thorough enough.

Wen | Liang Xiao, the chief writer of "Chinese Entrepreneur"

Editor| Zhou Chunlin

Head photography | Xiao Li

Editor's Note:

The market situation is changing, and the ebb and flow of enterprises needs to be calmly observed. From now on, China Entrepreneur has launched a commentary column "Taoran Observation" to maintain keen observation and present a clear position on hot spots and events in the business world. We will be here with you to listen, comment, and reflect. We look forward to meeting your eyes and minds here.

A "Kindle large-scale shortage of goods, will withdraw from the Chinese market" news, so that the fate of this internet red electronic products has become a hot spot of public opinion.

In the face of the rumors, Amazon's official response was ambiguous: "The high-quality customer service and warranty services provided by Kindle Amazon will not change." However, there are various indications that the "disappearance" of the Kindle has long entered the countdown:

In October 2021, the official Flagship Store of Kindle Tmall closed; earlier, the Kindle, which had high hopes, disappeared in Amazon's annual report, the last time it was briefly mentioned in the 2018 annual report. Until now, the Kindle's sales and revenue have been a mystery. Jobs seized on this point and joked: "They have never disclosed kindle sales figures, and generally speaking, if a product sells well, we are too late to announce it." ”

Jobs, who created Apple's great cause, seems to be qualified to ridicule his peers, and the fate of these two products is an interesting contrast.

In 2007, the Kindle debuted the same year as the iPhone. Both shouldered the ambitions and aspirations of the founders to disrupt the industry: Jobs predicted that the iPhone would "redefine the phone," while Bezos boasted that the Kindle "puts all the people who sell paper books out of work." The results have long been revealed - the former not only opened a new era of smartphones, but also affected people's food, clothing, housing and transportation; while the Kindle not only failed to eliminate paper books, but also retreated to an APP icon on the smartphone.

Two products that were also expected to be "epoch-making" at the beginning of their birth, why is the Kindle's road getting narrower and narrower, while the iPhone has become "someone else's child"?

In fact, the foreshadowing was buried from the moment the embryo was born. Although the innovation drivers of both have a more or less relationship with the iPod, the derivation logic is completely different: for Jobs, because he saw the built-in music player on the mobile phone, he began to worry that "the mobile phone will eventually grab the job bowl" when Apple's iPod sales soared, which gave rise to the idea of cross-border mobile phones; and for Bezos, he has watched Amazon's music business revenue be cannibalized by the iPod, in order to avoid the book business repeating the same mistakes, so he promoted the research and development of the Kindle . It's actually the "iPod" of the book world — and as a result, just as the iPod function was absorbed by the phone, the Kindle ultimately faced the same fate.

The battle has already been revealed. After the Kindle e-book became popular, the market once had a follow-up listing of e-book readers, and reached the peak of shipments in 2011, but 2012 immediately ushered in a sharp decline inflection point - this year is also Apple's own iBooks after the iPad test, began to synchronize on the iPhone.

Secondly, unlike Jobs's indomitable efforts to make mobile phones, Amazon's shift to hardware since the online retail business has started, the huge gap in business logic, and the continuous investment in equipment research and development and production have led to Bezos's attitude towards the Kindle more "verbal resolutely" and "hesitant to act". In response to the market's question about the Kindle's burning money, he once said: Kindle is sold at cost, because it is made from services and content; but it will not be too much on the hardware, because if the user does not use it, the loss will be in vain.

To some extent, this "mentality" has led to the "flywheel theory" that Bezos has been pursuing - lower prices attract more users, more users bring stronger bargaining, and the resulting price advantage further enhances user chips - although it is effective in online bookstores and AWS Cloud business, it has not been implemented in the Kindle business, especially in the Chinese market, "Flywheel" is encountering increasing resistance.

First, price competitiveness is being suppressed. Different from Amazon's single book selling logic, local competitors can use more diversified interactive means, ecological income other than book sales and other diluted operating costs, while Amazon, which has a thin business in the Chinese market, lacks room for maneuver in this regard; secondly, in terms of user experience, even Kindle fans are quite critical of its use feelings, complaining that it is a "Buddha nature" upgrade - not only a long iteration cycle, but also a slow bug repair, compared with the local reading APP that responds to market demand in a timely manner. The kindle's appeal is further weakened.

On the Zhihu Q&A, we can see the mental journey of many senior Kindle users from reluctance to departure, including the author. The love that was once worn away in front of reality and eventually drifted away from the Kindle, the reason for which may be because it is difficult to carry around at one time, or because the reading notes on the Kindle are difficult to export completely, or it is found that the mobile phone reading APP is more convenient and easy to use, of course, there are also comparisons that feel that the Kindle e-book pricing is expensive and the content is less.

Another sentence of Jobs that year seems to foreshadow the end of The Kindle today, "The future belongs to general-purpose devices, and users are likely not to pay for special equipment." ”

In a sense, the Kindle is an innovation that is not thorough enough. On the one hand, its purpose is to get rid of the physical shackles of paper books, but the traditional logic of selling books is still constraining its operating model; on the other hand, it hopes to improve the reading experience, but it does not constantly update and optimize the interaction experience between devices and users based on the same Internet thinking, resulting in user loss.

This problem remains the same in the current kindle's mobile app version. In the long run, the Kindle may lose not only the hardware dispute of electronic reading, but even the reading APP of smart phones, it is difficult to retain a "place". In Amazon's 11th letter to shareholders in 2007, Bezos launched the Kindle with great enthusiasm and affection, hoping that it would "light a flame and improve the reading world as its name goes." Today, people's enthusiasm for reading is still there, but the flame of the Kindle has dimmed.