Pretty much everyone knew that Amazon would introduce a tablet PC last week, but what may have come as a surprise to many was that the company also planned to get into the browser business.
Amazon Silk, as the new browser is known, is a somewhat unusual product introduction for the company, which is best known for online retailing. Then again, with Kindle, Amazon proved it could successfully market a hardware product, too, so perhaps the move isn’t that hard to fathom. If you’re wondering why Amazon has put a lot of energy and research into creating a product for which it will probably never earn a dime, here are a few reasons:
1. Quick Browsing
This is the ostensible reason for launching Silk. As outlined in the YouTube video above, engineers at Amazon thought the browser needed an update from the basic design that had been initiated in the mid-’90s. Silk employs a “split architecture” that allows the cloud to do much of the heavy lifting in web browsing. The upshot is that on the user end, browsing will go a lot faster and will be hastened further by using predictive technology to pre-cache content that’s likely to be requested by the user. For instance, if you read The New York Times‘s front page, Amazon will pre-cache the Business section because that’s where many people go next. Amazon’s in a great position to launch a browser of this type because it’s already big into the cloud computing business and, as one engineer in the video notes, “our back end has some of the fattest pipes to the Internet that you’ll find.”
2. Consumer Data
People don’t pay for browsers per se, but they do in the sense that they tend to give up a lot of valuable personal data when they use them. Not surprisingly, Silk has prompted some privacy concerns. For instance, Chester Wisniewski senior security advisor at Sophos Canada points out that Amazon will act as the middleman for all the web browsing you do on Kindle Fire. “If you think that Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you,” Wisniewski writes, “his service is guaranteed to have a record of everything you do on the web.” (For its part, Amazon says it tracks the data anonymously and is stored in the aggregate.) The combination of such data and Amazon’s predictive technology will no doubt lead to better targeting by the company than it’s getting just from its website.
3. It Will Get You to Buy More Stuff from Amazon.
This, of course, is the ultimate goal of anything Amazon does, and rightly so. Yet, it’s hard at first blush to see how creating a web browser will sell more books, toothpaste, diapers or whatever else Amazon wants you to buy. The fact is, though, that Amazon has created Kindle Fire to be a media consumption device rather than an end to itself like Apple’s iPad. Anyone who buys a Kindle or downloads the Kindle app can attest that there’s now an instant gratification aspect to buying books that is hard to resist. But what if Amazon used its Silk technology to hit you with offers in a timely fashion that you’re thinking of purchasing and can get it to you right now, at a good price? It will be hard to resist the idea that Amazon, which is losing about $10 on every Kindle Fire it sells, is investing that money well. After all, it’s seeding the market with state-of-the-art buying machines.
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