Amazon Lights the Android World on Fire
In just two years, tablet computing has gained unprecedented traction. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, global tablet shipment more than doubled during the last three months of 2011, rising to 26.8 units, up from 10.7 million a year earlier.
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet market this article lands in was forecast a year earlier: GigaOM's February 2011 call for 180 million tablets by 2014 set the growth expectations, and Bloomberg reported that same month that Android tablets were gaining on the iPad in the fourth quarter of 2010. What has changed by January 2012 is scale and structure — Strategy Analytics puts global tablet shipments at 26.8 million units for late 2011, more than double the 10.7 million a year earlier.
Into that doubling market, Amazon has made what the corpus confirms is an aggressive competitive push into the Android tablet world. The pickup breadth is itself a signal: eight outlets including TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Electronista ran the story on or about January 27, indicating the analyst community read Amazon's entry as a market-shaping event rather than one product launch.
First-order effects
- Amazon enters the Android tablet market as a competitor to the OEMs already shipping Android slates, competing inside their own platform camp rather than against it from outside.
- Apple faces a doubled shipment base (26.8 million units in late 2011 per Strategy Analytics) in which its iPad no longer defines the only credible price-and-feature point.
Second-order effects
- Android tablet makers are forced to respond to a rival whose economics can be subsidized by retail and media revenue, pressuring hardware-only pricing models across the Android camp.
- Amazon's push shifts competition toward its commerce and content channel, making distribution and media libraries — not just specifications — the basis on which Android tablets differentiate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet market stratifies into a premium tier anchored by Apple and a volume tier where content retailers set prices hardware vendors cannot match on margin alone.
- A fragmented Android tablet ecosystem — multiple vendors with divergent business models under one OS banner — points toward platform control becoming the contested question for Google and its hardware partners.
The trend: Tablets are moving from an Apple-defined premium category to a multi-tier market in which content and commerce players subsidize hardware to win the customer relationship.