Did We See an Oprah Effect?

Oprah endorsing a product is a huge deal. Oprah has a lot of money but she has a lot of power too as she has direct access to the ears of so many folks in the nation. I got to admit that when Oprah endorsed Amazon Kindle, I was a bit skeptic. I wasn’t sure if Oprah could encourage ordinary folks to pick up this revolutionary device. But according to the folks at Bloomberg, Oprah could be the reason why Kindle is and will be sold out for 3 months. That’s still no excuse for Amazon not doing a better job forecasting demand.

While it’s impressive that Amazon has sold 450-500K Kindles this year, it is still ways away to truly challenge paper-books. That will happen in the future, but no in 2009. The fact that Amazon stayed conservative with their forecasts also hurt them. Not only their loyal customers are made to wait for months to get their hands on Kindle, Amazon has left a lot of money on the table by not producing more Kindles.

Oprah or no Oprah, Amazon needs to take more risks with the Kindle project. Kindle won’t be great unless Amazon gets more aggressive. Selling 400K – 500K Kindles is impressive, but Amazon should be aiming for selling 5M in 2010.  That will all depend on how Amazon plays its cards.