If you think Apple executives are staying up at night cringing at the thought of the Kindle Fire’s remarkable sales, you’d be mistaken.
At least, that’s what JPMorgan analyst Mark Moskowitz says. He met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer last week to discuss the new shifts in the tablet industry.
“If anything, we think that Apple views the Kindle Fire as a device that stands to bring incremental consumers to the tablet market, and here, these consumers could gravitate to more feature-rich experiences,” Moskowitz wrote in an investor note.
He added that Android tablets like the Kindle Fire should be viewed as “soap box derby devices stuck between a tablet and e-reader,” and they won’t pose a serious threat to the unbridled power of the iPad until the second or third generation.
Of course, it’s pretty difficult to downplay the significance of the Kindle Fire movement. The flagship Amazon tablet has already skyrocketed to the #2 place in the tablet war, behind the iPad.
The Kindle Fire has catapulted above some of the heaviest titans in the consumer electronics industry, easily surpassing the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, and others.
And even though Moskowitz, an analyst at one of the most prestigious firms in the world, thinks Apple is all fine and dandy with the Kindle Fire, there are many other analysts who think that such a laissez-faire attitude is a colossal mistake.
It’s important to keep in mind that if we were talking about this market just a couple months ago, we’d be talking about no serious contender to the iPad whatsoever, so the market is definitely heating up. 2012 will be an interesting year to watch.
