Tell them, my song.

The long rumored Amazon tablet, the Kindle Fire, has officially been introduced yesterday. While new Android-based tablets are introduced almost on a daily basis, the Kindle Fire is something special and the first tablet that could give Apple’s iPad a run for the money. Why? Because Amazon sells it for USD 199 and because Amazon has a huge ecosystem that fuels the device with content. Also, Amazon has gained the trust of its customers over the years and the company has the muscle to push this new gadget.

The business model behind the Kindle Fire is almost the same as the one that Apple uses, and Amazon offers a similar infrastructure and comparable cloud services for their tablet. This battle will be fought over price and customer trust. And since the Kindle Fire is sold at such a low price, a lot of iPad owners might even be tempted to buy a second tablet to gain the easiest access to Amazon’s services imaginable.

Let’s face it: Nobody uses Apple’s iBooks. Amazon owns the eBook market, and rightfully so as most eBook buyers will agree. Amazon’s eBook portfolio and services are second to none. And unlike in the Apple ecosystem, you can even easily return bought eBooks within the first few weeks after the purchase. Amazon officially does refunds, Apple doesn’t. For me as a customer, it’s a no-brainer whom I rather want to give my hard earned money for digital content.

Some people are already complaining that although the Kindle Fire runs a strongly customized version of Google’s Android operating system, no Google apps are installed on the Kindle Fire and Google’s Android market is not installed on the device either. I understand that this is a real problem for most other Android devices, it is not a problem for the Kindle Fire at all. I have already summed up the reasons for this above: Amazon is the only producer of Android-based devices that has a serious content ecosystem. They are not just another hardware manufacturer. For them, the Kindle Fire is only a means to end: It is supposed to make the access to all that content as easy as possible. That is their focus. And that is exactly why customers will love the Kindle Fire and why it undoubtedly will become a huge success.

I fully agree with Jeff Bezos: They WILL sell millions of these.

The only downside that I see is that once again, this device is first sold in the United States only and the rest of the world will have to wait. If they would ship it to Europe, I would have already pre-ordered one.

I just took a short glimpse at the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my work notebook, a Dell XPS M1530 with 3GB RAM. I know that this version of Windows 8 is not even in beta phase yet and I am also quite aware of the fact that Microsoft is merely testing the waters at this point. However, the new Metro interface is a shocking experience, to put it mildly.

A friend of mine has this thing running on a PC and says that he is able to surf the web in under a minute after powering on the computer. Somehow, on my dual core notebook, the 64-Bit version of Windows 8 takes what feels like three minutes before it even allows me to log on to the system. And after that, it takes another -felt- minute or two before I see this abomination of a start menu.

Yes, the new start menu. As a colleague at work said, “it looks like a big cell phone”. It does. And it was also clearly designed with a touch interface in mind. The whole thing is horrible to use with a mouse and keyboard and obviously will quickly become messy when you have a couple of dozen programs installed. And according to the Microsoft developers, “the old star menu is gone”. I’ve read instructions on the web that in the current DP it can be re-activated via registry hacks, but that does not change the fact that the official statement is that it is gone. Unless corporate customers will force Microsoft to reconsider, chances are that the code for the old start menu will disappear completely from Windows 8 in one of the next builds. So for now, let’s assume that the Metro interface is the only start menu that we have – and that’s a BAD, BAD thing for people with ‘real’ computers.

I must repeat one statement here: My computers are NOT iPads or tablet PCs. They are regular notebooks and desktops. Things that I use with a mouse and a keyboard. I couldn’t care less for touch interface fanciness or gestures. I type and click. And neither Microsoft’s Metro nor Apple’s Launchpad were made for traditional user interaction – actually, they completely suck for that.

What also annoys me is that I still haven’t figured out how to CLOSE a running application in Windows 8 without using the brute force method of launching task manager and killing the app manually. It’s easy to move an application to the background, but there is no straight forward way to shut down a program completely. You know, by clicking on the “X” icon. Or by pressing Alt-F4.

Internet Explorer 10 also very obviously was designed for tablet computers and not for normal PCs. Which is not much of a deal for me, because I have stopped using Internet Explorer years ago.

Another complete nightmare for me is the new Windows Explorer. They put ribbons into it. RIBBONS! You know, that stuff that made Office 2007 the worst incarnation of Office ever. The thing that ruined good old Microsoft Paint completely. The piece of crap that apparently no user ever wanted but Microsoft shoves down our throats anyway because they think they can.

The only nice new feature of Windows 8 so far that I really liked was that casual ‘stranded astronaut’ game. That was kind of cute. But it’s not reason enough to install the developer preview on your computer.

Somehow, I’m really concerned about the direction where Apple, Microsoft and even Canonical are headed. They want to force the touch screen interaction paradigm onto EVERYTHING now – even on systems where it doesn’t make any sense. The entire industry appears to be single minded about the tablet phenomenon. The funny thing is that nobody that I have ever met has actually USED a tablet for REAL stuff like, you know, WORK. Swiping through a photo library is a nice gimmick. But try writing a blog post like this on a tablet – it just doesn’t work. I also cannot imagine a conference room filled with people who voice dictate into their iPads and tablets all at the same time. I also refuse to believe that writing comes completely out of fashion in the foreseeable future – no matter how much of a problem illiteracy in our modern society might already be.

So what do the visionaries in California and Washington State have in mind for the uncool worker class audience? Are the billions of us not even an afterthought anymore? Or do the designers and programmers at the large IT companies honestly believe that even accountants, bankers and lawyers will soon spend their days swiping through their charts and files?

On the other hand, when I see how many politicians in Germany lately have been found guilty of having simply copied and pasted their PhD thesis from the works of others, maybe creating new documents with swiping gestures is the future…