The Kindle Fire was met by a massive yawn from the tech community over the last couple days.  The early adopters found it to be slow, locked down, unflexible, bad at messaging and generally unimpressive. While some people, like Fred Wilson, found it useful for a very specific purpose, no one thought it to be a legitimate competitor to or even a low-cost alternative to the iPad.

I’m glad.  I was honestly worried that the Kindle would set tablets back another several years.  The problem is that people were beginning that Apple’s success was the thing to mimic.  That is to say that the best way to make money in personal technology was to try to control the Hardware, OS, AppStore, MusicStore, VideoStore, etc… all in one company.  Apple was really good at hardware and OS, so they moved in to the other areas (though it’s important to note that this wasn’t done over night, how smart does iTunes v1 and the iPod look now?).  Now Amazon, who’s really good at Music and Video Store is trying to move back down the stack.  This whole model is bad for consumers.

The best model for consumers is the best hardware people do hardware, the best OS people do OS, the best AppStore… well, you get the idea.  I think more and more, this model will win out.