Steve Jobs Mocks Amazon Kindle

I am a big fan of Steve Jobs (as a business man), and a long time Apple customer as well. So it’s not very surprising to see him come out with all guns blazing. He has changed the fortune of Apple with the iPod and the iPhone. So he deserves a lot of respect for upping the ante in the gadget business. And he has shown in the past that he has a great understanding of the market, and what it takes to build a killer gadget. Steve has never been a fan of one tricky pony devices, and while Apple has had such device in the past, the new Apple gadgets are all “multi-dimensional.”

Steve has bashed Kindle in the past, and he is at it again, this time calling out Amazon for not disclosing sales numbers with the public:

I think the general-purpose devices will win the day, because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.

I have to agree with this statement. Amazon Kindle can not be the next iPod without being good in more than one dimension. I have been asking Apple to add a microphone and a video camera to Amazon Kindle, and introduce a SDK to allow the Kindle community to develop enhancements for the device. Somehow we may see all these with Kindle 3.0.

You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody

This also can be the case, though I have to admit Amazon likes being somewhat sneaky to throw off its competitors. With companies such as Sony trying to capture market-share in the e-book industry, Amazon is keeping them all on their toes. Steve may be baiting Amazon into releasing those sales numbers. That would give Apple more information on how it can position its iPad to dominate the e-book industry as well.

It’s not too hard to see that Apple and Amazon will be going at it in the near future. Apple may have not announced the iPad yet, but that announcement is coming soon. Amazon is working hard on its Kindle 3.0, so it’d be one heck of a show-down when these devices go against each other.  We are getting a preview of it right now.