Bloomberg reported this morning that Amazon has its own smartphone in development, that the company is working with Foxconn in China for production, and that it has actively been acquiring wireless technology-related patents in advance of the launch. See the story here.
Even more so than its decision to challenge Apple's dominance of the tablet market by introducing the Kindle Fire, this move into smartphones is likely to leave a lot of consumers and investors scratching their heads. What business does Amazon - a web retailer - have getting into the phone market?
Let me take a stab at that...
Convergence of the Tech Giants
Though Jeff Bezos will deny it until he's blue in the face, this is a classic move of defense by playing offense.
There's a convergence going on in technology. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are quickly converging on the same base of customers. To be sure, there is a growth imperative at play, too. Each of these companies has become accustomed to growing at a rapid clip, and each has the ambition (and gall) to believe it should continue growing. And as each runs out of room to expand in its core markets, it will seek new growth by introducing services that poach customers from the other tech giants. The spheres in which they operate, once so placidly independent of each other, are beginning to overlap. If you put a Venn diagram of their markets on time-lapse video, the shaded areas of market overlap would grow darker and darker with each passing year. Convergence is happening.
And in a converging marketplace, if you don't play offense by actively growing into your competitors' markets, you run the risk that they will grow into yours in the near future. Offense becomes the best form of defense. It compels you to grow, thus the growth "imperative."
(To put this in the appropriate context, you should take a look at Farhad Manjoo's The Great Tech War of 2012, published in Fast Company back in October 2012.)
An Aside on Google
Google has been the most interesting case study for both the growth imperative and how a company reacts to convergence. For the time being, Google is spinning like a dervish. It seems to believe it must compete with each of these giants...and NOW. Its rivalry with Facebook has been well-documented with Google+. (See James Whittaker's Why I Left Google blog entry.) That's a competition for the future of advertising dominance, and I think it makes sense.
What makes far less sense to me is Google's foray into retail with its "Prime" one-day delivery deal with bricks-and-mortar shops (see this WSJ blog description and the best overview from amazonstrategies.com here). Google benefits from competition among lots of retailers selling the same products and bidding up adword search prices to get premier listing on the search engine. But with Amazon becoming the ubiquitous web retailer, more consumers are skipping Google altogether and just going straight to Amazon for searches. This is costly for the search engine. And so it goes on the offensive, putting its considerable clout (and resources) behind an attempt at a competitive retail offering.
According to a Walter Isaacson (the Steve Jobs biographer) HBR.org essay back in April, Larry Page visited Jobs in his dying days looking for advice. Jobs asked him..."What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”...FOCUS! Isaacson credits Page with taking the advice to heart. I think there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Amazon Devices to Prevent Apple iTunes Dominance
But back to Amazon and the smartphones. Amazon dips its toes in the water a lot. It's renown for its constant A/B testing and its devotion to running with winning concepts while ditching the losers. So once it decides on a strategy, Bezos brings the company all-in.
In that regard, the smartphones can viewed as an extension of the reasons Amazon developed the Kindle Fire. A sizable chunk of its business is electronic media (songs, games, apps, movies, and books), and that media is being consumed more and more on mobile platforms. Apple gained an early lead in the market for those platforms with iPod, iPhone and iPad, creating a close-looped ecosystem of content to boot. Jobs and company might let others sell their content on iTunes, but they extracted a pound of flesh in return. This was problematic for Bezos and Amazon. To prevent total dominance by iOS, he had to present an alternative.
So we received the first iteration of Kindle Fire. But we know that electronic media is consumed on other devices as well, so it's only logical that Amazon continues its all-in philosophy to ensure it gets a piece of that action, too. I would expect more (and better) tablets in the future. I would expect better links into television sets (Amazon branded set-top boxes). I would expect music players. And I'm not surprised by the smartphones.
So What Should We Anticipate from the Amazon Move?
First, lots of hiccups. We saw this with the early Kindles and with the Kindle Fire. It's unavoidable when entering a sophisticated new market with complicated electronic technology. Amazon was not a device manufacturer a few years ago, but it is nothing if not a learning organization. Expect it to build on its experience, constantly improve, and ruthlessly eliminate defects. So, hiccups at first, but Amazon will only get better.
Second, a low price. Amazon is committed to the low-margin/high-volume business model. It has the capacity to suffer, a willingness to take losses on the early batches of inventory while it grabs market share and improves its cost structure.
Third, potential volatility in its stock price. Going all-in on phones - while juggling lots of other growth initiatives simultaneously - has the potential to move Amazon from profits to losses. And Bezos is not afraid of letting his company lose money for a while if he believes it will pay off in the long-term. The market, however, will not take kindly to this. It's reasonable to anticipate bad financial press and a hit to its stock price if the company sports losses over multiple quarterly earnings reports.
Return of the Land Rush Metaphor
In 2001 Bezos told Charlie Rose (here) that Amazon understood the early days of web retailing (especially 1998 through 2000) through the heuristic of a land rush metaphor. That era was also dominated by a growth imperative. If Amazon didn't move at an almost reckless pace to establish scaled operations, expand its product selection, and improve its technology, it risked another retailer - fueled by a steady stream of venture capital cash - converging on its markets and earning the trust (and the habits) of customers.
Bezos recognized the risk of being outflanked, so he engaged in the land rush. He bought into every niche retailer that sold a product that he thought Amazon might want to sell someday, better to bring your enemies close than let them flourish outside your control. He invested heavily in technology and distribution infrastructure. He priced his selection as aggressively as he could to attract customers. He bled cash, almost recklessly, because it kept Amazon in front of the pack and reduced the risk that another retailer could gain a toehold in its market.
That land rush mentality came from Bezos' survey of the landscape at the time telling him that a convergence was afoot then, too. We see what he did to ensure he came out of the convergence as the dominant power. Indeed, he came out of the dot-com bubble burst as the sole hegemonic power of web retailing. Despite the Amazon stock price falling from $106 to $6, despite losing countless hundreds of millions in equity investments in competing web retailers, and despite losing upwards of $500 million in personal fortune as the stock plummeted...the bursting of that bubble took all the outside cash out of the web retail industry. Everyone had to fend for themselves, and Amazon was the only one that could. Bezos did alright through it all.
If he's reading the current technology situation with a mind to his experience in the early days of web retailing, I think we can expect him to turn to a page from his old playbook. He will compete ferociously, bordering on recklessness. He will lean heavily into his investments. He will play to dominate the markets.
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