I suppose some correction and clarifications are in order. First off is that Amazon runs like a startup, they make enormous income and spend it all, they have no problems being lossy to wedge themselves in and disrupt huge businesses run by companies many times larger (and right now they are huge). It's simply not a problem.
Thanks for the response. Amazon may run like a startup, but they're still a business. They make about the same amount of money (but far less profit) than microsoft does. I think you overestimate their ability or willingness to "disrupt" existing businesses. Let me give you some examples.
The kindle e-reader was successful largely because of amazon's ecosystem and marketing. in terms of pricing and capabilities, it wasn't any cheaper or well built than the nook, which was built by barnes and noble. Barnes and Noble isn't anywhere NEAR the class of Sony or Microsoft.
If we look at the kindle fire and kindle fire HD, neither one of these devices is any better than competing tablets in the same class. The Nexus 7, The Asus Memo, The nook HD, and the Galaxy Tab 7.0 are all equivalent in price and feature set. Why isn't amazon simply "disrupting" them? blowing them out? Hell, why isn't google? or samsung? Both of these could easily embarass amazon if they chose to. The answer is the same- there's a limit at which you can manufacture and sell these things before it ceases to make sense, even for a company as ambitious as amazon, or one that sitting on a metric pile of cash like google is.
I'm not sure where your engineering comments stem from though but I can tell you you're wrong on that front. There were a lot of things to like about the Kindle Fire from a hardware perspective from better screen with gorilla glass, to speakers with good drivers to the wifi features that you still don't see in the highest end hardware today in a package that was smaller than what was available at the time.
I already posted comments regarding the kindle fire HD versus the older version of the nexus 7 and the newer version of the nexus 7. it's worse than both. And asus manufactured both of those. Sony does nothing but hardware engineering, and has top class hardware in literally every field you can think of. Amazon simply doesn't. There's no way around that. Sony and Microsoft also have a literal army of first and third party developers that have done nothing but program for the PS360 for 7 years now and know the platform inside and out. That's not the case with whatever amazon has cooked up. They're behind the 8 ball in terms of hardware and software engineering. this isn't debatable- unless you feel Amazon has the equivalent of ICE team ready to go somewhere.
The amount of content on PSN and XBM doesn't even come close to mobile or Amazon's variant. It's literally and order of magnitude difference.
dead wrong. Sony alone makes 4 times as much revenue from their ecosystem as all games on google play combined. In terms of volume, there are somewhere around 800 PS3 games available, and another 600-700 games specific to PSN, PS1, or PS2 classics released that are available for download...and more coming every day. None of these are cheap clones or low budget trash that clogs the android market, but they're just as low cost. Some of these things can be had for as low as 2 or 3 dollars. There's even a chunk of high quality Free to Play games like DCUO. Throw Xbox live in there and it's a curbstomp.
But issues aside overall I don't disagree. Microsoft's target is likely not Amazon's. Amazon is probably just as concerned about selling videos as much as they are games. They probably aren't going high end because it's not enough to matter. But a high-end mobile chip can make graphics appealing enough and coupled with some exclusives and a lot price there can definitely be something there.
a high end mobile chip is still leagues below the PS360 in terms of pure hardware performance, and even farther when you consider there are hundreds of devs that have 7+ years of experience with the platform. You are not getting something like GT6 or TLOU out of mobile hardware no matter how high end it is.
