Kindle Fire 2 Negative Hype Cycle
What is a product negative hype cycle? It is the manipulation of your buying attitudes against a specific product! We most often think of advertising as pulling us towards a product, but there has been so much negative hype against the Amazon Fire, I thought it is worth noting. In the case of Amazon's Kindle Fire, Amazon's goal was to produce a lightweight Web/APP/eReader tablet at a price point well less than half of it's direct competitors. This put Amazon across the table from many deep pocket players that did not want to see Amazon succeed.
Here are a few examples of negative hype against the Kindle Fire:
1. There were many articles before the Fire was released that stated Kindle Fire should have a GPS, Camera and microphone to be REAL!
2. There were high profile usability experts, bought and paid for in my opinion, that stated Kindle Fire was a clear miss and Amazon would have to produce a Kindle Fire 2 in the spring to survive.
3. Many articles said Kindle Fire does not have enough memory or compute power to give a real tablet experience.
4. And the one I love, is that within hours of the Kindle Fire being released, there was a campaign of articles released out on the web stating that the Kindle Fire 2 would be released this spring, with quad core processors, a 10 inch screen, camera, GPS, microphone and so on.... and a strong recommendation that only a fool would spend their money on this Kindle Fire 1.
Well, here is reality. I personally know 6 kindle Fire owners and they all love their tablet. Is it an iPad? No! Is it useful and fun? An absolute YES! My wife has hers loaded up with books, movies, suduko, angry birds, her gmail works great, and a lot of bookmarked web pages that load fast. Storage? Well it is a seamless experience between putting stuff (books, movies, games and so on) up on the Amazon cloud and keeping it on the device. People I have talked to are very happy with the battery life, which works as advertised.
Also, the Kindle Fire community is happy, alive and growing with freebie, borrowing, loaning, buying and renting services. I expect to see many new Amazon infrastructure leveraged services released in the next 6 months to keep the user experience fresh and engaging.
Will Amazon likely produce a new version of the Fire in the future? Of course they will, but when Amazon determines the time is right. Amazon has pushed a software update to the Fire without any issues and I suspect that will continue. Amazon loves it's new position as a mainstream tablet device producer and content provider, and will lean hard into that space with big guns and deep pockets to keep the new Amazonians happy.
Ron Maddox
