亞馬遜Fire手機能撼動蘋果iPhone嗎
Nobody in their right mind is going to swap an iPhone for an Amazon Fire — a shopping machine that calls itself a phone, as Quartz’ Dan Frommer deftly put it.
沒有哪個腦子正常的人會把自己的iPhone換成Amazon Fire。正如新聞網站Quartz的丹o弗洛默所言，自稱手機的Amazon Fire明明是一款購物設備。That said, the smartphone unveiled by CEO Jeff Bezos in a Seattle warehouse Wednesday is a serious device that puts the business models of two tech giants in a new light.
話雖如此，上週三，由亞馬遜首席執行官傑夫o貝佐斯在西雅圖某倉庫發佈的智能手機Amazon Fire依然是一款不容小覷的設備，它令人從全新的視角審視亞馬遜和蘋果這兩大科技巨頭的商業模式。“Apple and Amazon are much more alike than they are different,” Asymco’s Horace Dediu wrote last summer in an essay called The Anti-Apple. They’re both in the business of “delighting customers” in controlled, predictable environments with convenience and ease of use. They both have huge customer bases (800 million for Apple, 250 million for Amazon). And now they both sell smartphones. For roughly the same price.
去年夏天，Asymco的賀拉斯o德迪歐在名爲《蘋果反對者》（The Anti-Apple）的文章中寫道：“蘋果（Apple）和亞馬遜（Amazon）可謂“大同小異。”兩家公司都致力於在受控且可預見的環境中，以便利性和易用性“取悅客戶”。兩者都擁有龐大的客戶羣（蘋果有8億用戶，亞馬遜有2.5億用戶）。而現在，兩家公司都在銷售智能手機，而且售價基本相同。
The main difference is that Apple’s AAPL -0.35% mission, as Tim Cook never tires of saying, is to make the very best products.
兩者主要的區別在於，蘋果的使命是打造最好的產品，這也是蘋果首席執行官蒂姆o庫克常常掛在嘴邊的一句話。Amazon’s Fire doesn’t have to be the best. It just has to be good enough. Its mission is to make impulse buying at Amazon’s AMZN -2.21% growing retail empire even more friction-free. If it does that well – using a point-and-buy feature called Firefly — some portion of those 250 million customers will trade up for one.
亞馬遜的Fire無需成爲最好的產品，它只要足夠好就行了。Fire的使命是，使用戶能更順暢的在亞馬遜不斷擴張的零售帝國進行衝動性購物。如果能通過名爲Firefly的掃描購買功能做到這一點，亞馬遜的2.5億用戶中，一部分原本使用較低端手機的用戶就會購買Amazon Fire手機。But they won’t trade down. Compared with an iPhone, Apple loyalists sniffed Wednesday, Fire’s user interface is “a mess.” It only runs, for now, on AT&T’s T 0.45% network. There won’t be a flood of new apps until developers are persuaded that it’s going to take off. And because it uses a forked version of Android, it can’t run apps purchased on either Apple’s App Store or Google GOOG 0.28% Play.
但原本使用更高端手機的用戶卻不會降低標準。上週三，蘋果的忠實粉絲對Fire的用戶界面嗤之以鼻，說它“一塌糊塗”。目前，Fire僅在美國電話電報公司（AT&T）的網絡上運行。除非開發者們相信Fire將大熱，否則不會有大量針對這款手機開發的應用。而由於採用Android的分支版本，Fire無法運行蘋果應用商店（App Store）或谷歌（Google）Play平臺上購買的應用。Still, it’s better than a flip phone. It comes with 12 months of free Amazon Prime shipping. Its camera is said to be excellent. It boasts some whizzy features (3D, Mayday, scroll’n’roll). And Bezos is not too proud to stick an ad for it in the face of every Amazon user who logs on. Unless Fire melts down in real-world usage, it will probably succeed in establishing a beachhead in an over-crowded smartphone market dominated by Apple (which skims off the cream) and Samsung (which, if you’ll pardon a badly mixed metaphor, mops up most of the rest).
不過，Fire還是比翻蓋手機強：它自帶1年免費Amazon Prime快遞服務；它的攝像頭據說相當好；它還有一些出色的功能（包括3D、求救以及scroll'n'roll功能）。而且貝佐斯大肆爲Fire向每位登陸亞馬遜的用戶做廣告。除非Fire在實際使用中出問題，否則它很可能將在由（把持高端市場的）蘋果和（統治中低端市場的）三星（Samsung）支配的過度飽和的智能手機市場佔據一席之地。One more difference between Amazon and Apple, perhaps the most important:
亞馬遜和蘋果還有一個或許是最重要的區別：Apple’s iTunes user base is growing exponentially but its sales per user are falling. Amazon’s user base is growing arithmetically, and its sales per user are relatively flat. (See Horace Dediu’s charts, reproduced below.)
蘋果的iTunes用戶羣正呈幾何級數增長，但單位用戶銷售額正在下降。亞馬遜用戶羣的增長沒那麼迅猛，單位用戶銷售額也比較平穩。（賀拉斯o德迪歐給出的圖表轉載如下。）“Apple’s user growth is a function of expanding its device portfolio and distribution,” Dediu wrote in April. “Amazon’s user growth is a function of expanding its logistics and merchandise mix. This is also not easy to do globally. Arguably, Amazon cannot scale in the exponential rates seen by Apple… because it has to depend on trucks and roads and regulators to complete most of its sales.”
德迪歐在四月份寫道：“蘋果的用戶增長是擴大設備組合及分銷的結果。而亞馬遜的用戶增長是擴大物流和商品組合的結果。後者難以在全球範圍內實現。可以說，亞馬遜無法獲得蘋果那樣的幾何級數式增長……因爲它大部分銷售的完成必須依賴卡車、道路和監管機構。”
