iPad vs. Kindle: It’s Way Too Early to Tell « Steve Wildstrom on Tech

A timely press/analyst/blogosphere/Apple reality distortion field reality check from Steve Wildstrom; see the full post 

The fact that Steve Jobs gave only the sketchiest outline of the iPad’s ebook capabilities and told us even less about the iBook store did not prevent a fierce debate from breaking out over whether the iPad will or will not kill Amazon’s Kindle. Now this argument  would be fundamentally misguided even if we knew a lot more about the iPad. It is a peculiar conceit of the tech industry that any new product has the be evaluated as the potential killer of some existing category leader, completely ignoring the very real prospect that both the incumbent and the challenger might prosper. For example, I think it is entirely possible the Kindle and other e Ink-based readers continue to be the choice of voracious readers of fiction and mostly text non-fiction, while the iPad wins the market for textbooks and multimedia newspapers and magazines.

But I digress. What really puzzles me is the tendency of analysts to come to firm conclusions based of the flimsiest of evidence—or perhaps none at all.

iPad vs. Kindle: It’s Way Too Early to Tell « Steve Wildstrom on Tech