Amazon releases their earnings this Thursday, and while most of you probably heard about the controversy regarding Amazon (#amazonfail) last week, what you may have overlooked in all the hubbub was the astonishing 300,000 Kindle 2’s sold in the less than two months since it’s release. That’s over a $100M in revenue from a single item. Amazon is expecting to sell 800,000 overall for 2009 – over $280M in revenue. Absolutely incredible. Oh and don’t forget the Kindle leads to higher margin book sales through wireless delivery. So it got me thinking, if there was a executive of the year award (I blame the NBA – it’s award season there), Jeff Bezos would have to be considered one of the frontrunners, right? Just for kicks, here’s a revenue comparision against their biggest competitor EBay (I guess I have to continue with my proclivity towards graphs):
And stock performance (take with a huge grain of salt, very different companies, and BBuy is signifcantly bigger than the rest with their $40B+ revenue) over the past 6 years compared to Best Buy, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, Ebay, and the S&P:
And while their commerce side is continuing to grow, their transformative cloud offerings, AWS, could dominate their revenue within 5-10 years. AWS is currently recognized in the “Other” category on their quarterly reports (last figured at $131M in Q4 2008). Anyways, who knows what will happen Thursday, but Bezos has definitely impressed me.
I had no intention to get a Kindle 2, mainly because of its high price tag. But my nephew (aka my sister and brother in law, seeing as my nephew is not even 1 year old) bought one as a surprise – and I love it. At first, I can’t deny I was disappointed. It didn’t include any accessories (for 350 you think you’d get a cover – very Apple-esque of them, although at least it did have an AC/USB adapter), there’s no light on the device, you can’t replace the battery, and the screen seems a bit small.
But then I started playing with it. The screen is phenomenal. When I first opened it, I mistakenly thought the picture (a portrait of a poet) was just part of the plastic covering the screen – I only discovered it was the display 5 minutes later when I looked at the screen. The e-ink is phenomenally clear and easy to read. Downloading books via the device or online is a breeze. The battery life seems great (only charged it once so far).
But two features seem really cool to me. First, it’s extremely easy to open up PDF and DOC files – just send them via email to your username@kindle.com and it shows up right on your Kindle home screen. Second, it has a web browser built in (under the experimental section). That’s right, it might be crude and only work on certain sites (the mobile versions), but I think it’s awesome that I can read ESPN articles as if it were printed out in paper. And it’s free. Pretty awesome. Sure there are other devices out there, but none seem as cool as this. I love my iPod touch – but I use that mostly for games. This device encourages reading – something much more useful and beneficial. Congrats Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team, you can count me as impressed. Now work on cutting the price.