Saturday, November 17, 2007

Can Jeff Bezos be Santa Claus?


subtitle: My Christmas Wish

All the news about Kindle, and my own very high hopes for the XO Pc got me thinking... wouldn't it be nice if.....

Picture the setting, the W Hotel in Union Square in NYC. One of the hippest locations in town. It's 9:30am on Monday, November 19th. Some nameless PR person from Amazon is providing a colorful introduction for the main speaker, Jeff Bezos, President, and resident big kid at Amazon.

With his trademark guffaw and his huge smile he approaches the podium with a big cardboard Amazon box. He puts the box down on a small table beside the podium. He looks at the crowd, and gives them another of his 'billion dollar grins'.

He reaches into the box and pulls out the Kindle, and triumphantly holds it up over his head, and says nothing. The crowd starts to clap, there are obligatory smiles all around the room which is crowded not only with members of the press, but with big dignitaries from all manner of companies, not the least of which are book publishers.

This goes on for a full minute, and Mr. Bezo's guffaws start to drown out the room. The first words he says are, "You all thought I was going to announce this today, didn't you?". The room goes silent, then the murmurs of people whispering among themselves grows to the sound of a loud air conditioner. More guffaws.

Mr. Bezos goes on, "No, everything you read is true. It still looks like a B2 Stealth bomber and still has a few software glitches."

He puts the Kindle down, and reaches back in the box. He pulls out an odd looking green and white laptop. He opens it, flips up the little bunny ear-like antennae and laughs again.

He says, "Now this, is ready, and it is sooooo cool!"

"What I am here to announce this morning is that Amazon is going to put its full marketing and distribution muscle behind the One Laptop per Child Program!". The crowd is stunned - most don't even know what the program is.

"In fact, we are putting on a promotion, for every $100 book order, we will send you one of these XO pc's, and the OLPC people will send another to a needy child in a third world country. We at Amazon believe so much in this program, and have a goal of providing 20,000 of these to the world by January 30th."

Another big grin, and he continues, "Just think how many of the kids that will use these machines will make their first online transaction from Amazon.com? These machines are so cool, that I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I got it."

Its fun to dream...........

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