Last week, the announcement of Amazon Fire line of products created a sizable splash in social media, Consumer Electronics, business and IT publications. While this new device does not have specs of a tablet, most observers immediately started to pin it against iPad. Is it a fair comparison? The answer to this question depends on your definition of what a product is. If you define a product by its functions and features, the answer may be – No. However, if your understanding of a product agrees with Clay Christensen’s definition as the “jobs-to-be-done,” the iPad and Fire will most definitely compete for the same share of consumer wallet, as most customers of these devices use them for web browsing/entertainment most of the time.
Since the Amazon Fire is not yet shipping to the customers, I would like to offer a comparison between Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad 2 from the perspective of their customers. Online marketing research produced this analysis of 7,706 customers feedback published in social media.
The image above highlights the attributes of customer’s experience most important to them as they have articulated in their feedback. No keywords were used during the analysis to identify these attributes, and no questions were asked to influence the answers, as surveys are not our business or part of our opinion mining methodology.
You can click on this link to access the dynamic dashboard and verbatim (by clicking on a specific bar).
Given such a high perception of value users of relatively primitive but extremely functional Kindle give to their experience, the Fire is poised to make a sizable bite out of current iPad tablet growth prospects.
