经济学人下载:互联网巨头用低价战略 进军平板电脑市场

The cloud is crucial to the success of Amazon’s gadget strategy. Most analysts think that the firm loses money on the hardware that it sells. But it hopes that its cheap tablet will be wildly popular and therefore boost sales of Amazon’s cloud-based content, just as the Kindle e-reader boosted sales of e-books. It’s like free parking outside Walmart—you want potential customers to see what’s in the window.

云计算对亚马逊便携终端战略是至关重要的。多数分析家认为该公司在其出售的硬件设备上遭受了损失。但是，亚马逊希望便宜的平板电脑能大受欢迎，并因此推动亚马逊基于云计算内容的销售，就像Kindle电子阅读器推动电子书的销售一样。这就如同沃尔玛商场外的免费泊车，你希望潜在的消费者看见橱窗里是些什么。

The good news for Amazon is that tablet users seem moreinclined to splash out on stuff than web shoppers who use PCs, according toForrester, another research firm. One possible explanation for this is thattablet buyers tend to be richer; another is that the immersive experiencetablets create encourages more impulse buying.

据Forrester研究公司研究，对亚马逊来说的利好消息是，平板电脑用户在商品上是似乎比使用电脑的购物者更愿意一掷千金。有可能解释这一现象的是，平板电脑的购买者趋于更加富有；另一个解释是，平板电脑带来沉浸式的体验鼓励了更多的冲动消费。

Whatever the reason, Amazon will have to hope that its gambit works, because its business model has at least one worrying downside. Its profit margin is a page-thin 3-4%, partly because it has invested so heavily in the cloud. Now it is going head-to-head with Apple, which made ajuicy $7.3 billion net profit on revenues of $28.6 billion in the latest quarter. Apple may not want to provoke a price war in the tablet market, where it sees plenty of growth to come. But if it does return fire, Amazon could get its fingers toasted.

不论是什么原因，亚马逊都希望其策略奏效，因为它的商业模式存在至少一个令人担忧的缺陷。其利润空间只有薄如纸张的3-4%，这部分是因为亚马逊在云计算上投资过多。现在，它开始与苹果争锋相对，苹果从去上季度286亿美元的收入中获取了73亿美元的净利润。苹果可能不愿在平板电脑市场掀起价格大战，它在这一市场中看到了巨大的利润增长空间。但是，如果苹果反击，那么亚马逊可能会焦头烂额。