Kindle Fire vs. iPad: The battle at home may hurt your iPad at work

While everyone’s been speculating on whether Apple would release an “iPad Mini” (all but certain) for the holidays to compete with the well-liked Google/Asus Nexus 7 and the anemic Amazon.com Kindle Fire, Amazon.com has been working to reinvent and improve on the Kindle Fire. As we learned yesterday, the new Kindle Fires — there’ll be both 7-inch and 9-inch models — to be released in November are the fruit of that effort. They’re aimed squarely at the iPad’s home users, as Amazon.com seeks to supplant the iTunes-centric Apple ecosystem with an Amazon-centric one.

The tech press loves to write about “wars” between vendors, but this battle is indeed worthy of the label. If the new Kindle Fires displace iPads at home, the collateral damage could change the iPad’s role in business, too, in a way that diminishes the BYOD phenomenon.

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The importance of iTunes beyond the home In work environments, iTunes is typically dismissed as irrelevant, but work usage is only a fraction of why people adopt iPads, and it’s iTunes that forms the core rationale for an iPad as a home entertainment device. Google has finally figured that out, with its Google Play strategy not just for the Nexus 7 but for the entire Android and struggling Chrome OS platforms. Even Microsoft now understands that need to appeal to all aspects of a person, as its Windows Store/Xbox strategy shows for the forthcoming Windows 8.

For Apple, iTunes sales of music, videos, and books already brings it more revenues than iPods do. Apple has steadily moved from being a hardware company to a services-based platform company. Last fall, Amazon.com introduced the original Kindle Fire hardware to move from being a content-delivery company to a services-based platform company, but that hardware was underpowered and its user interface clumsy; after the initial sales spike, sales faded.

Google, perhaps perturbed that Amazon.com took its Android OS to create a platform that didn’t tap into the Android Market (later renamed Google Play), came out with its own Nexus 7 tablet. Like the Fire, the Nexus 7 is focused on delivering content; it has revved its Chrome OS to support that content as well. Although the all-Google content platform simply isn’t as good as what Apple delivers via iTunes and iCloud to Macs, PCs, and iOS devices, the Nexus 7 easily outclasses the original Kindle Fire.

Not any more. Based on what Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos showed yesterday, Amazon.com has grown serious about hardware design, unveiling an 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet with 32GB of storage, fast Wi-Fi (using two antennas in addition to the 5GHz spectrum), stereo speakers (the iPad is still painfully mono), and built-in LTE 4G, all for $499. That’s $230 less than the comparable, 9.7-inch iPad (which also has 5GHz Wi-Fi, but just one antenna) and much superior to Google’s Nexus 7 hardware. Amazon.com rounded out its offerings with an updated 7-inch Kindle Fire whose hardware is now equivalent to the Nexus 7, as well as an updated Kindle e-reader with an even more readable screen.

With that hardware and the bolstered movie and TV deals Amazon.com recently cut for its video offerings, you have an ecosystem very much like Apple’s iTunes, but with a much bigger book selection and a more Netflix-like video library, not to mention games, an iOS stronghold.

The big drawback to the Amazon.com ecosystem is that it’s limited to the home. Apple’s iPad fits easily in both home and work environments, quickly becoming the standard platform for both — separately and across the two. The original Kindle Fire supported basic email, but the new model adds Microsoft Exchange to Google Gmail and POP services like Yahoo Mail. Amazon.com hasn’t said if the Kindle Fire supports on-device encryption or Exchange ActiveSync policies, both critical to enterprise permission to access corporate email, so we don’t yet know if we’ll see Kindle Fires being used as a supplemental work device as employees now do with the iPad. [Updated 9/10/12: Amazon.com says the Fire will support on-device encryption and common EAS policies.]

Google also wants Android to work across personal and business environments, but it hasn’t done the heavy lifting Apple slogged through to accommodate the corporate world. It fits into small businesses, but not most larger ones. Plus, Android tablets have not cracked either the home or work markets — a sharp contrast to the huge sucess of Android smartphones outside of the work environment. Google admitted this week that tablets account for just 5.8 percent of its Android activations. By comparison, iPads account for 39.5 percent of iOS sales. (Note: Apple hasn’t released iPod Touch figures, so their impact on the iOS percentage can’t be calculated, but you get the point.)

Microsoft has a similar goal with Windows 8 tablets and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, both heavily tied into the Microsoft Store, which offers music, movies, and games. But Windows 8’s poor usability on both PCs and tablets, coupled with the limited app ecosystem on Windows Phone and Windows 8’s Metro environment, put Microsoft behind Google — and way behind Apple — in its attempt to be an enticing ecosystem for home and work.

Fewer iPads at home could reduce demand for BYOD What we’re left with is a herculean battle between Apple and Amazon.com for the entertainment side of the user’s life. Should Amazon.com displace iPad usage in homes, that could reshape the iPad’s role in business. After all, if fewer people have iPads for their personal use, there’ll be less demand for BYOD scenarios, at least those involving tablets. iPads would continue to be relevant as business devices, but they could easily become corporate-issued devices like PCs, not the single platform a user has for both work and home — the fundamental enabler of the consumerization and BYOD phenomena.

Email BYOD might survive if the Kindle Fire supports corporate-class Exchange policies, allowing employees to access messages while working from home on the Fire, not just on the iPad and Android tablets. But should the Fire displace iPads in sigificant numbers, its lack of business apps — a market Amazon.com has shown no interest in — would nonetheless push tablets as a class away from business usage, as well as lessen the duality of personal and business access that characterizes the iPad.

Plus, there are many IT organizations that would love it if the BYOD concept became restricted to email access, as that would contain their (mainly unfounded) security fears and also let them justify keeping out the deeper strength of the iPad: its universe of applications.

In other words, tablet BYOD could be an unintentional casualty of the Amazon.com/Apple war on the entertainment front. If Amazon.com truly delivers (the hardware this time looks good, but the software might still be bad, for example, and the lock-screen ads are yucky), Apple doesn’t bolster its tablet, and users start to shift away from the iPad. They’re all big “if”s, but plausible enough to contemplate.

This article, “Kindle Fire vs. iPad: The battle at home may hurt your iPad at work,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.