Amazon have taken us by surprise

So, the Amazon kindle fire was announced today, and from a financial perspective, it looks like a real competitor. It uses a modified version of the Android Operating System, with a full colour, touch sensitive 7" screen, dual core processor, and access to a very stable network of music and video. And at such a great price ($199), it's going to cream the market.

But, this isn't all. Amazon have also announced the 'silk' web browser, which will be used on the new Fire devices. The Silk browser leverages the power of their ec2 web services, and does much of the heavy processing in their cloud servers. This will enable the Fire tablets to run browser apps much faster, and not have to rely on heavy on-board processing. This is going to cut down on load times, and request times giving the user a much snappier user experience.

It seems that amazon have been a bit of a sleeper, and have been quietly planning this huge announcement for a good while. This has probably put the willies up google and microsoft. Especially microsoft. At the moment, they must be wondering where the hell they should make their next move. IE9 certainly doesn't leverage the Azure platform in the same way.

Google have been concentrating on Google+ lately, and who the hell knows what microsoft have been doing - apart from confusing developers with their announcement that html5 and javascript will be playing a major part in the next version of windows (leaving WPF and silverlight developers wondering if they need to re-train as plumbers).

I'm very impressed with Amazons' game plan here. This could really kick off a browser war again - which is not good for individual companies, but is great for the consumer.