Amazon's Shot at Apple

Think about what makes Amazon a great and successful (book) company:

• They offer a huge variety of highly desirable products, many of which haven't traditionally been available outside large cities/specialty stores
  
• They charge reasonable prices vis-a-vis their competitors
• They provide tools that make it very easy to find not only what you're explicitly looking for but also items that you didn't know you wanted
• Their purchase process is streamlined and simple
• Working together with UPS, they've provided a seamless delivery mechanism for what you buy
• They provide "endorsement" tools: reviews, rankings, etc. that help to confirm your leanings towards purchase
• They provide "engagement" tools: send to a friend, the ability to rate reviews, etc. that provide reasons other than just a buying impulse to visit their site

Now think about what Apple has done with the ecosystem of iTunes and the iPod. Is there absolutely anything different between the two companies? Couldn't you list precisely the same reasons for Apple's success? Would anyone that has bought books from Amazon hesitate to purchase music, or would music music aficionados hesitate to buy a book from iTunes?

Apple was able to brickbat the record labels into making their products available for purchase electronically, mostly because it was a rearguard action against rampant piracy. Book publishers haven't had that fear, except in a very limited way from Google's scanning efforts. Now that book publishers have gotten over the intellectual hump of electronic versions of their books, why would they restrict themselves to selling solely through Amazon's Kindle? There may be (unknown at this point) contractual obligations, but those can't be forever. Clearly the inevitable evolution is the platform-agnostic electronic book.

Bezos has to be thinking that he can compete heads up against Apple by providing books, music, movies, and other digitized intellectual property faster/better/cheaper. I wonder. Amazon's software certainly doesn't seem to be groundbreaking, and it's almost rude to compare their hardware designers to Apple's (or RIM's or even Palm's). There are numerous companies who have staked their existence on building out around iPods. Who's going to tool up a line to make Kindle covers or the other accessories that make the iPod preferable to the other technically equivalent mp3 players out there? The long aapl-short amzn pair trade should be very interesting over the next few quarters.