Amazon’s Kindle ereader has been that rare thing in the mobile world ‘ a device with a genuine market requirement, but which has also changed the rules for other categories. The ebook machine has been the most important testbed for one of the expected hallmarks of ‘4G’ ‘ consumer devices with connectivity embedded, and no carrier contract, with the operator getting its revenue via a fee from either the gadget vendor or the content owner/distributor. This model is likely to spread into many areas of consumer activity, and the ereader has also influenced the emergence of a broader device category too, the wireless tablet. The next logical step, of course, is for Amazon to follow Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others into that general purpose tablet market, and many believe this week’s cross-licensing deal with Microsoft heralds such a move. (It could also, of course, point to a Microsoft ereader).
Since Amazon opened up its Kindle software development kit, with a view to creating a full apps platform, it has seemed likely that it would broaden the reach of its popular device beyond books and newspapers. In particular, we expect color Kindles, and ‘Kindle-pads’ with multimode screens, switchable between e-ink (essential for a good reading experience) and LCD. This could take advantage of the clever multimode display technology from start-up Pixel Qi, while multitouch is also on the cards – Amazon recently invested in a pre-commercial touchscreen specialist, Touchco, which will be merged into the retailer’s Kindle hardware division, Lab126.
The next piece in the jigsaw may well be the cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, announced this week, which would protect Amazon from patent lawsuits if it extended the Kindle’s reach to become more threatening to Microsoft’s ecosystem. Microsoft itself has put extensive work into tablet and ereader form factors in the past, though it has not launched a reader itself.
The arrangement, of undisclosed value, gives the online retailer access to Microsoft’s intellectual property. Kindle is specifically mentioned in the statement and the wording appears to hint at an Amazon branded tablet PC, which would be marketed for optimized consumption of all kinds of multimedia content on the move, rather than just books ‘ and with the same smooth download/store experience already present on the original Kindle. This was even praised at the iPad launch by Apple ‘ itself no slouch in creating attractive integrated device/store experiences. CEO Steve Jobs conceded that his firm was ‘standing on the shoulders’ of Amazon with the iPad’s iBookstore.
The licensing deal covers a ‘broad’ though largely unspecified range of products, and mainly seems to relate to Linux ‘ as used in the Kindle and Amazon servers. Similar agreements have been forged with many firms with regards to Microsoft IPR in Linux and other open source technologies, including TomTom and Lexmark. Microsoft has often claimed that the Linux kernel and stack infringe on its patents, though it has been vague about which ones are at fault, except in the TomTom case, which centered on the FAT file format. However, even if the two giants are gearing up to limit the legal fall-out should they come to blows in the tablet space, their real battlefield is in the cloud, where Windows Azure is head-to-head with Amazon EC2.