Amazon Kindle Fire and Silk’s Cloud Browsing Evolution

On September 28th, Amazon.com announced the Kindle Fire. a $200 Android Based tablet that is plugged into all of Amazon’s services. This will be the first device that supports Amazon Prime‘s new Netflix Streaming Video Competitor. It will also become the most dangerous competitor Apple has ever seen.

Amazon markets to the masses, they make their money by having you buy lots and lots of their stuff. I myself use an Amazon.com Visa card as my primary method of payment for everything, because I get a minimum of 1% back in gift cards (2500 points was $25.00 gift card.) Happy as I was with that, Amazon just lets me SHOP with the points instead of having to redeem the cards…amazing. Have to love when companies make customers lives easier.

So, being a happy Amazon Prime customer already, your damn right I ordered that thing right then and there, jumping from the news page to the newly redesigned Amazon.com home page to see the beautiful Kindle Fire, add to cart, add a nice leather case and a warranty, and there goes my $300( I had $400 in points just sitting there 😉 ).

Amazon’s new front page says something too. It’s a search bar…they are a search engine for products, get whatever you want, just type it in! They are one of the first merchants that, I believe, is so popular they really dont even have to have a single product on the home page to make a sale. They can use it like a real home page, giving real news, the latest and best products and information you need. If you want something, you’ll just search for it. Thats what 10+ years of search engine indoctranation and use has done to us.

After ordering the Kindle Fire and knowing almost nothing about it, I saw a link on Amazon’s home page that discussed about it’s new Silk Browser. Essentially, the browser uses Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) to process a web page in the cloud, and serve it optimized, and near complete, on a device.

It’s a Cloud Browser…

This removes any hardware limitation for web pages due to the intense Javascript processing and image downloading done by AWS, and then sent to you.

Cloud Browsing is an amazing idea. I’ve known ans enjoyed cloud servers for years. Load balancing is a must for high traffic sites, but never did the though occur to me that the user could use the same power. I took for granted that our devices just always get better, and when my current device starts to lag I replace it with something more robust…now…this may not ever need to happen, to a certain extent.

If amazon can control the complete output to screen and user interaction with that output, and translate it into small sized optimized communication between AWS and the User, then we have something huge. The web is changing. Our interfaces will get simpler, not more complex, the heavy lifting can be done in the cloud.

In my opinion, cloud browsing could even solve the issue of bandwidth caps, having AWS process and filter out the uneeded data that is sent to your home devices. If you could install Silk on the PC, the browsing experience would be lightning fast, and you would reduce the load on your bandwidth.

Unfortunately, evil service provider companies like AT&T and Comcast probably would just LOWER the bandwidth caps even further if the web became more optimized and less bandwidth heavy…gotta love not having almost no competition for service providers…

I say cloud browsing is a great step in a new direction. Let’s optimize what we have and utilize the massive backbones that these successful and giant companies have been creating. Support them and let them give the public something amazing for free or even for a small fee.

I’m still waiting for a “Google ISP”, so this nightmare of worrying about how much bandwidth I’ve used month to month can go away…