Short answer: no, given that they’ve sold only a quarter-million of them in 10 months (verses 6 million iPhone 3Gs sold in one month.)  But TechCrunch poses an interesting idea: license the technology — especially the software — to other manufacturers.  In other words, make the Kindle the de facto platform for electronic books.

Conventional wisdom is that Apple torpedoed its market share back in the 80s and 90s when it refused to licensed its operating system to other manufacturers.  (Despite the iMac buzz, their market share is still in single-digits.)  Microsoft-licensed copies of Windows running on a broad range of PCs took over the market.

You sure wouldn’t confuse the Kindle with something created by Apple’s design team.  It screams “PC” rather than “Mac”.  So licensing it to others make sense to me.

Hmm … after reading that last paragraph, I’m thinking the title of this post should be “Will the Kindle Become Amazon’s PC?”  Or, “Will the Kindle Become Amazon’s Windows?”  Well, anyway, you get the idea.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on August 26, 2008 - 1:24 pm

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