Amazon’s Kindle Fire has generated a lot of success for the company and with it has come positive attention for Amazon. Over the Christmas holiday season, Amazon announced that they saw record sales with their tablets and many were looking at the Kindle Fire as a viable competitor to Apple’s iPad.
This week however, Apple has responded and while at a conference in San Francisco, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook noted that they weren’t to worried about Amazon and the success that they have seen recently. In fact, Cook went on to say that Amazon represents a “different” type of competitor with its own strengths and weaknesses. Cook also acknowledged that Amazon has sold a sizable number of tablets and expects that they will continue to do so but the market that Amazon is going after is different then the one that Apple wants. In fact, Apple’s market would not be “satisfied with a limited function kind of product.”
iSuppli recently came out with their own report that showed that in the fourth quarter, Apple sold 15.4 million tablets which was a record for the company. However, as a percentage of the global market, Apple saw their market share decline from 64% o 57%. At the same time, 3.9 million Kindle Fire tablets were sold, accounting for a 14% share of the market.
The Amazon Kindle Fire can still be considered fairly new in the market and the success of this tablet will depend upon Amazon’s “business gamble” which is to offer up low cost hardware which will hopefully in turn generate big sales at Amazon.com
