Business Insider points out some depressing numbers for Amazon’s Kindle device…

AT&T said yesterday that it activated 400,000 to 500,000 3G-enabled iPads in the U.S. last quarter.

How many Amazon Kindles and 3G-enabled Barnes & Noble Nooks did it activate?

Fewer than "roughly 900,000."

That comes from a press release from wireless carrier AT&T, which announced today that it activated "roughly 900,000 connected devices" in Q2, including the Amazon Kindle, 3G-enabled Nook, and around 850 other devices, "such as eReaders, netbooks, digital photo frames, personal navigation devices, home security monitoring and smart grid devices.

Let me say upfront that I don’t think these numbers are good.  Even if all 900,000 are Kindles that’s not a lot considering it’s prominent spot on the Amazon home page.  But at the same time if the Kindle disappears tomorrow I think it will have served it’s purpose. 

By jump starting Amazon’s digital efforts it allowed Amazon to extend its dominance into e-books and that’s a big deal.  Try this: Name the companies that have managed to beat Apple in the world of digital distribution of content. 

If you came up with a company other than Amazon you’ve thought of one more company than I have.  Apple has been on a role since the original iPod debuted.  Music, Movies, and TV have all been dominated by Apple despite the best efforts of their competitors.  But in books it’s all Amazon.

(It is beside my main point but I’d like to point out that Amazon is even dominant in audio books since iTunes uses Audible’s content and Audible is owned by Amazon)

This is important for two reasons.  First, as stated above, Amazon needs to hang on to it’s core business (printed media) when that business transitions into the digital age.  Kindle allows it to do that.

But the second reason is perhaps even more important.  This keeps Amazon in the digital game.  Amazon has not given up on its digital media aspirations and dominance in e-books makes people accustomed to buying digital content using their Amazon account.  If Amazon’s smart they’ll do everything in their power to ride Android’s success and become the dominant digital media provider for those devices.  If Amazon can become the “iTunes for everyone else” they’ll be in a very good position in the future.

So while the Kindle Device itself might fade into history Amazon will owe much of it’s future digital success to it and it that sense it may very well have saved the company as a whole. 

So this Old Spice Responds to Questions Thing is getting a little out of hand.  Apparently even Google’s CFO felt the need to interrupt a conference call to say it was “a glimpse of where the world is going”. 

I want to make a couple points on this but just so there’s no misunderstanding let me be very clear: The campaign was brilliant.  It was as perfect as I could imagine an ad campaign being.  They knew when to be funny, knew when to be human and most importantly knew when not to wear out their welcome.  But at the same time I think it’s spawned some false conclusions. 

This Wasn’t Social Marketing

I disagree that this was a  “social campaign” as many have said.

The character didn’t have a conversation with these people he simply used what they said as a jumping off point to be funny.  It was an amazing act of improv on the part of the writers and Mr. Mustafa but it was a performance.  It was aimed at a larger audience than just the person being spoken to.  So it really wasn’t “social” by the commonly accepted definition. 

This Wasn’t a “New Kind of Ad”

What the ad agency (Wieden+Kennedy) did was the same thing that any great ad agency would do: They used the tools available to them to make ads that didn’t feel like ads. 

But that’s what great advertising has always been.  If you’ve ever listened to the radio you’ve heard one of those contests that says “be the [whatever number] caller and win tickets to [some event]” .  In the back of your mind you probably realized that was advertising but the fact that it’s a contest obscures that fact.  Which is exactly what makes it great advertising. 

The person who first thought that strategy up was no different than Wieden+Kennedy are now.  They had a radio station and a phone and they used creativity to mold them into great advertising.  Just as the Old Spice Ads used YouTube, Twitter, et al. to do the same thing today. 

Conclusion

The point I’m trying to make here is you have to focus on the real lessons .  The lesson isn’t “do what the Old Spice Guy did” it’s “Be Creative”.  It’s not “Twitter is the future of media” it’s “know the tools available to you and use them”.  These are all old rules and they still apply.  Which leads me to my last point.  Because anyone who knows advertising knows one of the cardinal rules is this…

Brilliant ad campaigns are amazing. Those who do direct copies of those campaigns are Lame. 

So unless you can come up with a new spin or you actually WANT TO BE the “lame copy of the Old Spice Guy” I’d put this whole thing out of your head and rely on your own creativity.   

I read a lot of blogs.  A LOT.  So trust me when I say these are the biggest complaints regarding Google Android’s App Store

1.  It’s Hard to find Applications

2.  The quality of the applications are lower than what you find on the iPhone

Given those points I find this move by Google odd…

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

So Google is essentially going to flood the market with even lower quality apps?    Really?!? Doesn’t seem wise to me.

But there is one good argument for this tool in the post and that’s the educational angle. 

One student from Professor Wolber’s class told us: “I used to think that no one could program except CS people. Now, I've made dozens of applications for the Android phone!” Another student, who struggles with dyslexia, was inspired by App Inventor to take more computer science classes and is now learning Python.

I’m all for getting kids interested in programming and Google should be applauded for doing that.  But there’s a better way and this is the last thing Android needs right now.

Anyone who has studied Apple knows the main problem they had for the 5 years before Steve Jobs came back was strategic vision.  Apple’s always been a company people are passionate about and they could always draw engineering talent because of that.  But without someone to pull it all together and focus it they turned into a company that couldn’t get all their great technology into a coherent product.

Google needs to learn that lesson here.  They have a strategic goal which is to empower the web and their focus should be to very slowly pull Android into the fold.  That means allowing professional developers to create apps so Android is competitive with the iPhone while slowly making the web app experience richer. 

So while the goal of educating people on how to make simple apps is great it would be much better if focus was put on the web and not on Android native apps.

One Last Point… A valid counter point to the argument I lay out above is that web apps require someone to know how to host their own server, deploy to it, etc…  I’d disagree with that.  Google could allow people to deploy these apps easily (and for free) on their already existing cloud host Google App Engine.  Or if they wanted to avoid connectivity problems they could have the tool create locally hosted web apps (Android’s supported HTML5’s offline abilities since the “eclair” release).