Mind Wars
This column is all about media as the battleground of the marketing world – a world constantly at war as each company pushes its brands in the name of service to the consumer, providing us with goods and services that our everyday lives depend on. Needless to say, political parties are also companies that push for their individual candidates as brands, promoting them and “selling” them to voters at election time. It is also about the marketing of media themselves – how individual media channels compete for our attention, and consequently become molders of our tastes and preferences.
The inevitable has happened. After Amazon announced it would introduce a $199 media tablet, analysts knew that it wouldn’t be long before an even lower-priced challenger would surface and join this new war. The Kindle Fire is still a few weeks away from launch, and already the internet is abuzz over a $35 tablet from India.
While the $199 price of the Kindle Fire undercuts even the cheapest Apple iPad by a cool three-hundred bucks, the Aakash (the word means “sky” in the Indian language) undercuts the Kindle Fire by $164, and the cheapest Apple iPad by $464. How’s that for a price war? What’s the catch? You have to be a student from India.
At a press conference in New Delhi, the government announced it would start a program by giving out 500 Aakash tablets to a group of students, inviting them to test out the device. Up to 100,000 units will be bought initially. India hopes to give out as many as 10 million units of the device over the next few years. Considering the price tag, the Aakash is not too lacking in features: it will have a 7-inch touch screen, a pair of USB ports, 256 megabytes of RAM, and it will run on the Android 2.2 OS. It supports web browsing and video conferencing and a three-hour battery life, but questions remain over how it will perform. Earlier tablets that have emerged (mostly from China) have been disappointing in their performance – short battery life, slow processing, scruffy sensitivity to touch, among other complaints.
Suneet Singh Tuli, the CEO of Data Wind, manufacturer of the tablet, said he hoped the Aakash would provide an alternative to luxury devices such as the iPad. "Our goal was to break the price barrier for computing and internet access," Tuli said. "We've created a product that will finally bring affordable computing and internet access to the masses." Data Wind will also make a $60 commercial tablet called the UbiSlate.
The Aakash is the latest attempt to speed the process of development through internet access. An earlier project, the One Laptop per Child program has been turning donations from the first-world into computers for the third-world since 2005. Officials hope the Aakash tablet will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind the wealthier urban areas in connectivity. In India, as in most developing nations, the rich have access to the digital world, while the poor and ordinary have none. The hope is that the Aakash would end that digital divide by breaking the price barrier to computing power and internet access.
So there are now several fronts on this war: first, there is the software battle between the Operating Systems –currently dominated by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. The Apple OS is exclusive to their devices while the Android is available to any manufacturer. The other contenders include RIM Blackberry’s QNX Neutrino and Microsoft’s Windows 8 for Mobile Phones. The Blackberry system is exclusive to them while Microsoft does not manufacture a device for its system. Instead, its system is licensed to manufacturers – in particular, Nokia. Two other earlier contenders are now officially out of the race as their owners have thrown in the towel: HP’s webOS (just days after it was launched in the TouchPad), and Nokia’s Symbian. HP is pulling out of the PC and media tablet market completely, while Nokia is signing up Microsoft as its partner in the next generation of their smartphones.
Secondly, there is the hardware war between the manufacturers: here, the hot item is the not-so-talked-about recent purchase by Google of Motorola’s mobile phone division. The acquisition gives Google an edge over Microsoft, as it now has its own device manufacturing facility, putting it on equal footing with Apple, which has both hardware and software products. By all indications, the smartest thing that Microsoft can do now is to acquire Nokia. That would put them on similarly equal footing with both Apple and Google, as well as RIM Blackberry. The emerging trend is that companies with full control of both hardware and software components have the edge – as best exemplified by the success of the iPad.
The third front is content, where the major fight will be between Apple and Amazon – particularly for music and books. Google has no inventory of content, and cannot compete in this arena. But they do have the advantage of offering search – which allows their users to access content from practically everybody else. That is something that Yahoo! can also offer, but they seem to be unclear right now about which direction they want to go.
The last front is going to be the most challenging for all the players: price. Amazon picked a fight on this front by offering the Kindle Fire at $199. And now we have Data Wind of India upping the ante by offering the $35 Aakash. Lenovo, the largest PC manufacturer in China had earlier announced they would match Amazon’s price for the Kindle Fire with their $199 IdeaPad – but that announcement was barely heard as it was soon overtaken by the hotter news from Hyderabad.
We weren’t wrong… the next great technology war is on.
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