Amazon's Jeff Bezos Talks New Kindles and What He's Doing Next
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For the last two years, Amazon.com has scraped and clawed its way to a relatively minor position in the exploding tablet market. Its Kindle Fire tablets, which run a heavily customized version of Google’s Android operating system and plug directly into Amazon’s own media and e-commerce services, have set a low threshold for tablet pricing and helped spark a wave of small, 7-inch imitators such as Apple’s iPad Mini.
While Amazon has helped to change some of the rules of the tablet game, it’s hardly winning. Data tracking firm IDC puts the company’s share of the U.S. tablet market in the second quarter at 4.6 percent, compared with the iPad’s 50.7 percent (Samsung has 18.5 percent). IDC says Amazon’s global market share is negligible.