Agreed on shipped vs. sold (Though I DID have a conversation 2 months ago with a B&N employee - says they went out of stock a couple times).
Agree also about the recipe for success: Find a niche and optimize for it.
If even Apple doesn't yet know what their tablet is for, how are we supposed to know what their inferior knock-offs are for? But it sure is obvious what a Color Nook is for. It does have an app store but the apps are for the most part related to reading, as you'd expect.
The fact that the Color Nook can be converted into the least expensive half-decent Android tablet is just an interesting aside.
So you're calling the Nook Color a tablet?
I'm not sure that's a fair representation of the device... it's cheap, a decent e-reader, and hackable to run at least Froyo (from last I checked).
In comparing the e-reader to the tablet, the Nook does indeed blur the lines, but it's resistive touch and e-ink display combined with hackery to run a full touch OS means it's really in a league all it's own.
Perhaps this is the recipe to success for the upstarts. Ignore the "X market" as that means X is commoditized. Differentiate by seeing the pricing and/or vision gap and dive into it deftly.
A footnote: comparing "shipped" vs. "sold" numbers is a bit facile. Lots of difference there. It'd be nice to see definitive "sold" B&N details, but they're not sharing.
Agreed. I played with a Nook Color a couple weeks ago and was impressed. If I could figure out a reason to add yet another piece of portable electronic junk to my collection (alongside a Nexus One, a Dell netbook dualbooting Linux or Mac OS X, a laptop, a Kindle, a DS, and probably other crud I can't remember now), it's what I'd buy. It's cheap enough to nearly be an impulse purchase, it seemed fast enough and powerful enough for what I'd want to use it for (though the netbook with a keyboard works better, since writing is mostly what I imagine I'd want to use it for), and it was cute and fun to play with.
So, yeah, there's already a low price point competitor to the iPad, though it's not being marketed as such. B&N may be making a mistake in not pushing it harder as a full-featured tablet...but maybe they know its limitations better than I do. At that price point, it almost certainly is similarly specced to a very low end Android phone, so probably can't actually run a lot of bigger apps effectively.
You're absolutely right that Nook Color is a far worse general purpose tablet, for all the reasons you mentioned. If the question though is how to carve out niches in the overall tablet market, then Color Nook answers with one possibility:
A sub $300 e-reader than can, in a pinch, work poorly as a tablet. The Color Nook can do quite a bit of what a typical person wants, right? Like consume news (Pulse), check and respond to e-mail, and browse text-heavy sites.
You can of course do so much more and so much better on an iPad or Galaxy Tab. But not everyone needs "so much more" enough to pay for it.
Surprising tidbit about the Color Nook: women love it for the women's magazines:
Not the profile of a typical hacker news member but hey - if there's a niche for a device you can stick in a purse to substitute for a handful of women's magazine's - what's wrong with that?
Maybe the market will bifurcate into iPads at Galaxy Tabs at the top, and a bunch of niches serviced with less expensive devices?
The Nook Color is an example of a $250 tablet with less functionality than an iPad. Though Barnes and Noble has not released any official sales figures, it is easily outselling all other tablets except for the iPad. This seems supportive of the authors assertions and I'm surprised this information was not included in the post.
And the following is the first 2 paragraphs of a Q1 digitimes report:
Barnes & Noble already takes delivery of 3 million Nook Color e-book readers, say sources
Yenting Chen, Taipei; Steve Shen, DIGITIMES [Monday 28 March 2011]
Barnes & Noble has taken delivery of close to three million Nook Color e-book readers from its production partner, according to an estimate by sources from the Nook Color supply chain.
With a clear differentiation to Apple's iPads in display size, targeted market and pricing, the Nook Color, priced at US$249, has actually taken up over 50% of the iPad-like market in the North America market, indicated the sources.
I played with a Nook Color at B&N a couple of days ago. If I were to buy a tablet, that's the one I'd buy. It's dirt cheap ($249), seems reasonably fast, and can be hacked into a real Android tablet (not a reasonable thing for a normal consumer to do, but it wouldn't be a problem for me). But, the things I could think of to use it for, I already have a Kindle and a Nexus One and a netbook for...so, I opted not to add more electronics crap to my very small house. Maybe the next generation Nook Color will convince me that a tablet is something I need/want.
My point is that the price of the HP was obviously wrong. It's not an Apple product...people don't expect to pay Apple prices. There's an assumption (right or wrong) that Apple imposes a stiff Apple tax on every product they sell, so I expect any non-Apple product to be much cheaper and have better specs. When that expectation is not met, I feel like the non-Apple product is over-priced. Apparently the TouchPad also sucks, while the iPad is apparently awesome, which makes the TouchPad an even harder sell.
I think the key difference between B&N and Borders is that BN actually had a digital strategy long before Borders ever did. According to this article they were already dabbling with ebook delivery in 2001:
Right now though, I think one of the best things is they have the cheapest Honeycomb capable tablet in the Nook Color (with some hacking). The screen is IPS and the processor is a 800Mhz A8 ARM, capable of overclocking to 1100Mhz. It's effectively a scaled down IPad in terms of processing/screen. From a hacking perspective it's more interesting than anything Amazon has shown.
I think the real problem is that Borders is trying to pivot on a dime. They saw the .com implosion and assumed the digital revolution was hot air leaving their position unassailable.
First of all get your facts straight android troll. The nook color is not and will not sell as much as iphone or the ipad. Second it's the kindle fire that's the second best selling device... Which tons of people kept returning because of its limitations. We live in america did you forget that you get what you pay for? That crappy honda that you might have isn't worth what a mercedes or bmw will. Technology works the same way. Get off androids nuts. It's rugged. You also forget the fact that apple is their only competitor. Android is turning into windows in tablets and cell phones. Yes there's a variety how many pieces of crap computers are out there with windows. Plenty... How many tablets and cellphones have android and are crap? PLENTY! It's called common sense... Next time get your facts straight.
Nook could, possibly, become a business model on its own. It has merit as a stand-alone product and general audience will be willing to shell out $250 for a tablet. If trend catches on, economy of scale will kick in and B&N may start making decent profit on it.
On the other hand, you can't exactly market a barcode scanner to the general audience...
1. Now Nook is just another Android pad. Amazon has Android app for Kindle. Nook is a Kindle. Good luck to B&N on trying to compete with the rest of the market. They'll probably be buying whatever is cheap and just re-branding it, as I'm sure they're doing now. This will mean it's not a quality product.
2. People will continue to buy iPad no matter where the market goes. It will continue to be the trend-setter when it comes out soon with a hidef screen, 3d and battery life to match. The fact that B&N doesn't do any Hardware or Software work will mean their quality and finish will suffer. I imagine they're selling it at cost or slightly above to stay competitive with the Kindle.
My guess, in the long run, people will have a new Android pad and then another. Kindle users will still be using their device for reading and buying books because that's all it does. But when color e-Paper come out, Amazon will be the only manufacturer with a mature OS that is practical for the slow refresh rate of e-Paper. The battery life and display quality over typical LCDs will make it appeal to a niche that no other device has.
Early reports suggest almost 3 million NC's sold in four months[1]. That would mean a run rate of at least 6 million per year. That is astonishing for a brick and mortar retailer with no consumer electronics background. The very attractive price point (could drop under $200) and decent ergonimics (lightweight 7") would mean NC could end up taking a major chunk of the light browsing/reading/email/ebook-reader market.
1. Amazon now has to bring out a tablet running Android. It is only a matter of time before the NC drops to under $200 and then people start buying the NC instead of Kindle. While rooting the NC is easy, if you check the downloads of the images, I would say less than 15% end up actively rooting. So that means no Kindle app on NC.
2. Apple now has to figure out alternate uses for the iPad since they are going to get disrupted on the browsing/email/ebook-reader category. I don't even know if they can bring out a 7" iPad (current investments in 10" and maybe even hardware optimized for 10"). Looks like they are trying to repurpose the iPad into a gaming device. In any case, they can't be happy with the rapid rise of NC. Strangely B&N is the only company which has a lower supply chain cost than Apple in the tablet market -- they own retail, they don't have to do any OS development, they don't have to put out the latest hardware.
Seems to me they are comparing apples and oranges. I think there isn't that much intersection between both products and who would buy them. I have been thinking about getting a nook and I already own an droid.
I see Amazon and B&N taking a big chunk out of the low-cost tablet market, and it will be hard for anyone else to compete.
They can sell direct to consumers and capture more revenue. They have a vested interest in locking customers into their ecosystem, so they can sell at cost. Finally, they are trusted brands and can use their online stores to promote product.
A company like HP and Samsung would make most of their profits on the sale of the device. $200 tablets will never be profitable on their own, so unless you have another revenue stream, it's not worth doing.
That leaves cheap clone systems probably running Android with crappy build quality and nonexistent engineering.
You can be sure that Amazon noticed the frenzy over $99 Touchpads and the strong sales of the Nook color.
i think a big question is how much is B&N losing on each nook color sale? 7 inch IPS panel with a decent processor.
10 inch tabets over $300 don't make any sense to me. archos 70 and 101 seem like the only sane products for the casual computing market that doesnt already have an ipad.
I agree on this point, but not because no one wants to. People talk about the "perfect device" and so you end up in feature hell and a device that does everything, but nothing well. It makes marketing easy. "Device X does 11 things, device Y only does 9, obviously you should buy device X."
The minimal route produces the better interface, but people hate feeling like they've spent more for less. Either way, I'm interested in where the market will go. Make no guesses about it. Apple is making an eReader. A tablet that is both a notebook and an eReader would SUCK. The tech isn't there yet. What Apple wants is a device that ties back into the Apple store and captures another media segment, not a revolutionized notebook that does everything.
That said, I have had a chance to use the nook and admit it is both comfortable and functional. Given some software revs it may usurp the kindle as the contender to beat.
B&N isn't making a mistake in not pushing it as a tablet...because it's not a tablet. It's an e-reader that just happens to have a little web browser and app store mechanism in it. B&N is selling these at a loss (or at least breakeven) hoping for the makeup in book sales. They can't be running around telling everyone that it's great as a web tablet and ignore the book thing.
#2 Since the iPad 2 wasn't shipping at all, its volume is 0 at the time this was said. That much is inarguable, full stop. Ergo it is a lie.
#3 Provide documentation then, don't guess. Since you're obviously an Apple fan (not saying there is anything wrong with that), guessing will only provide numbers and situations that you want -- confirmation bias.
For it not to be a lie, Apple must own not 88% of the market, not 90% of the market but some number larger than 90%. And yes, include Nook colors since they're Android tablets and sold out and back-ordered where I live. And include Windows tablets. And include cheapo Walgreens Android tablets, and RIM tablets and Nokia tablets, convertable notebooks/netbooks, netpads and whatever other random tablet form factor is out there today. If you want to constrain the form factor to "a big screen that you touch and carry around" so that it excludes Kindles, I think that's fine and makes sense. Here's some lists of tablets so you can start your research.
Unfortunately, all indications are that Apple owns somewhere between 85-88% of the tablet market today. Which is a fantastically impressive number considering that Microsoft has been trying to build the tablet market for many years and Apple's only been at it a fraction of the time. That is the number that should have been presented, it's an amazing number. There's no reason to fabricate a number and lie.
I think your comparison is more than a little narrow. The Nook and the iPad are marginally similar but not really comparable devices. There's a reason why one has been far more successful than the other, and no, I'm not referring to any sort of "magic" or ephemeral voodoo.
But there's a larger point to be made in that I think your comments reflect a common attitude among many nerds - this obsession with specs. Most consumers don't make purchasing decisions based on a giant list of specs. Maybe you feel they should and they're stupid for not doing so, but that just isn't the reality of the market. And many manufactures, as well as Google, are starting to realize they simple can't put a faster processor and more memory in their products and expect to compete with Apple. Google in particular is putting a lot more effort in to the "polish" and overall "experience" of using Android devices. I know these are dirty words for some, but they reflect the market realities of how consumers make purchasing decisions. And I think it's a good move that will help Android increase it's market share even further.
Define 'beat'. Right now there's nothing on the market that can match both the iPad's features and experience and its price. The Nook Color is intriguing as a cheap Android tablet, but it's not at all in the same league as the iPad or Xoom.
Agree also about the recipe for success: Find a niche and optimize for it.
If even Apple doesn't yet know what their tablet is for, how are we supposed to know what their inferior knock-offs are for? But it sure is obvious what a Color Nook is for. It does have an app store but the apps are for the most part related to reading, as you'd expect.
The fact that the Color Nook can be converted into the least expensive half-decent Android tablet is just an interesting aside.
EDIT: typo
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