On that Retrevo blog

“We’re not positive that some respondents didn’t confuse Amazon the manufacturer (Kindle) and Amazon the reseller ” – Retrevo

And that could just be the edge that Amazon needs. They have the best … what do they call it … vertical integration

You can’t seriously argue that Apple’s design>build>sell>support mobile strategy isn’t working for them so far, but to me the interesting question that’ll be answered when the dust settles, is how “open” or “closed” of an ecosystem would the Amazon offering have to be in order to effectively compete with Apple. Google’s version of Android is .. well it depends who you read but I’m not convinced the entirely ‘open-ish’ way is working yet. But then it’s not Google’s core business, and they’ve shown little interest or ability with hardware so far.

If Amazon took it upon themselves to invest smartly in polishing up the Android ‘experience’ on their own hardware, the fact they already have a large audience of consumers that already trust them and their sales channel (something much closer to a bricks-and-mortar store than the more nebulous Google has ever been) could give them the edge they need. They’d be like budget Apple, without the snazzy shop fronts. It’s not hard – they just have to come up with an ecosystem-in-a-box that works for the user as well as it does for the company.

$5 says this is the thing – the next-iPad-killer – that Apple is most likely to be actually looking over their shoulder at. Interesting Times.