The first thing that struck me about Jean-Louis’ Amazon-centric Monday Note was this quote from Amazon’s shareholder letter, regarding memos:

“We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’ Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.”

Fascinating. OK, back to the topic at hand:

Amazon now has 100M Prime subscribers and is a respected, if not feared, supplier of video content, some of which is home-grown and recognized as world-class. Amazon has the means — and the need — to envelop its Prime subscribers in its Everything walled garden. An Amazon Fire TV set finishes the job the Alexa-powered Echo devices started. After a hard day’s work, you come home, ask your Amazon TV to turn the AC on, order dinner from the nearest Whole Foods store, and watch the latest Harry Bosch episode.

I do agree that Amazon’s focus on Fire TV sets is an important chess move and step toward their own walled garden. But, as I’ve said before, they are missing a critical element, a phone with wide adoption. If Amazon ever found a way to ship a phone that competed well with iPhone or, if it was Android-based, ate significantly into the Samsung/Google/etc. marketshare, that’d be trouble for Apple.

In addition, a Fire TV set solves the “Input 1” problem, the default connection that comes up when you turn the TV on. Not important? Think of the billion (or billions — some say three) that Google is rumored to pay Apple to be its default search engine on the iPhone.

Fascinating point. What comes on when you turn on your TV? For me (and, I’d argue for most folks), my TV defaults to whatever input I was watching last. But a TV that makes it super easy to watch Amazon video content with some frictionless combination of built-in seamless UX and tightly integrated remote? That’d have value, I think.

Apple TV is still a second class citizen for me. Or, at best, a peer to my cable package that requires me to keep two remotes handy and switch inputs regularly. I would love a more integrated solution.

Jean-Louis always keeps me thinking. Note his use of mutatis mutandis. Had to grab the dictionary for that one.