Panos Panay has a problem with Diet Coke. This topic came up immediately after I walked into the small interview room and he offered me drink options and told me that my partner has a similar addiction. . After a quick conversation about the benefits of drinking plain water over Diet Coke, I knew that his wife, like me, advocated cutting down on soda, but I realized that the man actually I still didn’t know anything about how much to drink in a day.
This was Panay’s first announcement event with members of the media since leaving Microsoft last year to lead Amazon’s devices and services team. And the moment I walked into the event space at The Shed in New York, I thought, “This is like a Panos event.”
The room was bathed in sunlight, and a variety of neutral and pastel pink sofas and armchairs were arranged in a hazy semicircle, facing a modest elevation. Around the stage, various greenery that looked like lavender and baby’s breath was neatly planted, giving the scene an overall softness.
There was a leather stool on the stage that looked big enough to sit on, but wasn’t comfortable enough to actually rest on. Next to it was a small wooden end table with a Solo water bottle on it. Panay did not sit down once during his 38-minute presentation. Wearing a black collared shirt, black jacket, black jeans, and black shoes with brown trim, Panay displayed his usual sentimentality at the Kindle launch event.
As always, he didn’t shy away from mentioning his family, showing a carefully photographed photo of his daughter Bella reading a Kindle on the couch. He called members of the media by name, greeted Lance Ulanoff in the front row, and asked David Pierce if he could hear him. At one point, he walks to the center row and hands his new Kindle to tech Youtuber Jacquelyn Dallas, who taps the screen repeatedly to scroll through the pages and see for himself how much faster he believes it is. I asked her to confirm.
Amazon
I say this because the Panos experience is so engaging and engaging that it draws you in so much that you miss the fact that he repeatedly refers to Kindle Scribe as a 2-in-1. This is to give the impression that it is something that invites you to even experience it. Admittedly, it gives me more patience than I normally have for a technology leader who spent almost a third of his presentation talking about the history of the Kindle and how it fits into people’s lives. That was enough. Instead of thinking, “Okay, I want to hear about your new device without any preamble,” I just laughed at the joke, made eye contact, and related a personal anecdote. And I knew it was past the 38 minutes he promised the speech would last, but I didn’t care that he was still talking.
However, when we sat down to talk, I was able to ask some questions about the 2-in-1. That word brings to mind images of the Surface tablet and iPad, not to mention the Surface Duo and Surface Neo, which Panay announced at a very similar Microsoft event years ago. Kindle? There aren’t that many. But, according to Panay, Kindle Scribe “does two things and does them very well. At the end of the day, it can only do two things.”
People want to read on Kindle, but they also want to write in books. “Both experiences have to stand alone in a great way,” he added. “You can buy this device for writing, or you can buy this device for reading and bridge it.”
But if a device pursues too much, it can become too complex. When I asked him about what’s next for Kindle Scribe and the challenges it faces, Panay said: That’s probably the biggest challenge – that it doesn’t happen. ”
“The customer focus is insane at Amazon,” Panay said, explaining that the team interacts with users, reads reviews, and studies how they use products to better understand their needs. He said he is doing so. “Fundamentally, for this team, it’s about knowing what our customers need, being passionate about it, and making sure we deliver it.”
“Stop trying to reinvent things that people don’t need to reinvent.”
The approach Panay brings to Amazon takes into account his background (and life) at Microsoft. Although he never explicitly mentions this, we can’t help but wonder if he learned something from the company that announced and never actually released the Surface Neo dual-screen laptop.
Panay said that in understanding customer needs, Amazon must also try to anticipate what customers want. “You also have to understand where the technology is going and have a roadmap,” he said. “We need invention and creation to get us ready for our destination, so when people land we have what they need next. Hopefully we can get them there.” I hope it’s your product.”
“Stop trying to reinvent things that people don’t need to reinvent.” Panos Panay
The desire to predict trends makes me nervous, especially at a time when all major companies are rushing to pack generative AI capabilities into their products. How should companies like Amazon resist the urge to jump on the bandwagon and avoid producing products that ultimately result in useless hype? For Panay, the answer is patience.
“Patience is everything,” he said. “What is the right thing at the right time for a product? How is it useful? How elegant is it?” I admitted it. This is not a fad. ” What AI can bring to Kindle Scribe and other products has the potential to improve them. But “it’s important to me to make it useful for everyone and to keep it simple.”
Kindle Scribe has just two AI-based note-taking features that basically read your doodles and turn them into something easier to read and understand. These are not groundbreaking concepts. I’ve seen at least five different companies launch summarization tools in the last year. But Panay made it clear through personal anecdotes on stage that these are important to him and his staff. He doesn’t want people to see his handwritten notes, but he will show them the AI-organized version. I don’t know if the rest of the world’s Kindle users will find these useful.
For now, Panay wants to perfect the Kindle Scribe experience. “You can never make something perfect, I’m never satisfied. But right now, it feels like paper, it feels like an eraser, it feels like you’re writing something, and there are no distractions. He called it his favorite child during the presentation (but later said he felt guilty about doing so).
There are many other children in the Amazon hardware family that Mr. Panay oversees. He’s not just talking about the four Kindles launched today, including a new color e-reader called Colorsoft, but also the company’s smart home, robotaxis, satellites, consumer robots, Alexa products, and even Fire TVs and tablets. I am also in charge of
“It’s an eclectic product group on some level, but it’s also really a very related product group at the same time.” There’s more that Panay couldn’t say about the record yet, but “there’s a lot of magic that we haven’t shared with the world yet.” There are a lot of them,” he said. More realistically, it’s about seeing these things “connect in ways that make a difference to people’s everyday lives, both inside and outside the home.”
Engadget’s Charlyn Lowe
There are other ways Kindle Scribe could evolve, but that’s not a stretch of the imagination. The most obvious one is a color display, which Panay agreed is “probably not impossible,” but said he couldn’t discuss future roadmaps. But we can certainly guess.
It’s interesting that Amazon is giving Colorsoft a whole new name, hinting that it will probably be a separate product line, but it makes sense that Colorsoft is a one-off and that the color panel will be integrated. That’s true. It can be rolled out to other existing Kindles in the future.
Another potential technological change to the Kindle is to make it foldable. In response, Mr. Panay simply said, “It’s an interesting concept.” When I pointed out that he was not an expert on folding devices, he admitted, “Absolutely not,” but added, “There are a lot of concepts in the lab.”
But importantly, he repeatedly states, “I don’t want to create technology for the sake of creating technology.” If the idea is correct, Panay is open to considering it. “But for now, keeping it simple is where we are.”
