Amazon is one of those 21st century companies that run a state-of-the-art network but have no clue about aesthetics or design. Just like their friends in Redmond, they think being fabulously successful means anything they do must be right.
Great design has great value but must be encouraged by the CEO, otherwise it will get so compromised that it ends up looking like this new Amazon contraption.
Contrast this with Apple whose CEO appreciates the value of great design, yielding products that most of us appreciate as much for their functionality as their aesthetics.
I used to be an employee of amazon. Amazon is a retailer run by a wall street type which thinks its a technology company- so it hires a large number of engineers, and even larger number of non-engineer middle managers and it barely survives an incompetant management and technological infrastructure.
I saw the Kindle in someone's hands at Amazon over a year ago- and it looked the same. This is not a device that's going to compete with the ipod where they release 2 revisions a year...and amazon is well known for coming up with ideas, throwing them out there as products to see what will happen and then shutting them down when they fail... often even sucessful products are abandoned or destroyed when the team that created them is reorganized onto another project and there's nobody there to keep the code running... cause nobody is responsible.
In short the whole company is a clusterf*ck.
Kindle will be forgotten within a year and then will make a minor splash a year later when amazon shuts down the network and the 10,000 or so kindle owners complain because they can no longer read the books they bought.
And amazon the company, its going to fail at some point-- a lot of talented engineers there, but the management ranges between incompetent and asshole... its a casualty of the dotcom crash that is just lingering on the table pretending to be full of life.
For me, it also has the same problem that makes the iPhone a paper weight: I don't live in an area served by Spirnt's EV-DO network (or AT&T Wireless in the case of the iPhone).
Why do tech companies keep bringing in new and exciting technologies (in general, Kindle could hardly be called "exciting") and then handicap them with idiotic service provider exclusives? Oh, that's right, greed is more important than customers.
"For me, it also has the same problem that makes the iPhone a paper weight:"
I have sort of the same problem: my wife insists on the much-loathed Verizon, so -- no iPhone. I AM planning on an iPod "Touch" when my "nano" dies, though.
Carl: How is it that meatheads buy AMZN at a 90 P/E? They had ONE good idea. I like the way they sell CD's and books; nicely organized E-store. But that's IT. They haven't had another idea since. And their profit margin is less than 3%. I'd almost rather buy Dell of MSFT than these guys, and I have a pretty low opinion of those companies.
Talk about overpriced and ugly. 
There is design in the physical sense and there is design in the sense of the whole product - including the pricing, the marketing, the distribution and the service experience.
In this case, the service experience will, I suspect, be the determiner of success or failure. If it turns out that finding, buying and having instant access to the content Amazon provides (and then being able to search within it and look things up in Wikipedia) is compelling, it won't matter that the device is butt-ugly (which it surely is) and there will be slicker versions coming down the pike.
Commenting by HaloScan
