The Wall Street Journal a few years ago ran an article about Swintec, one of the last surviving typewriter companies in the U.S. (Please see the WSJ article for more information.)
Edward Michael, who started the company in 1985, is quoted in the article as saying, “We’re typewriters. This is our specialty. This is what we know.”
Down to about 10 employees now from about 85 during the boom years, Swintec continues to sell typewriters at a click-clackety pace: between 3,000 to 5,000 units a year, mostly to universities, senior centers, and prisons. Yes, typewriters are quite popular behind bars — especially now that Swintec came upon the novel idea of a clear typewriter designed to prevent the smuggling of contraband.
From our point of view, typewriters aren’t going anywhere. After all, the vacuum cleaner, as Mr. Michael points out in the above video, failed to replace the broom. Nor did the typewriter replace pens and pencils.
The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side.
Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double of the Fire’s Android market share since December.
The Kindle Fire is in warp drive — far outpacing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (15.4% of Android), Motorola Xoom (7%), the Asus Transformer (6.3%) and others by Dell, Lenovo and Sony.
But the tablet market leader remains Apple’s iPad, which, according to the market research firm IDC, owned about 55% of the tablet market at the end of 2011. Android tablets accounted for about 45%. This is all great news for Amazon, meaning about 30% of tablets currently shipping are Kindle Fires, making the Fire a close second to the iPad.
Despite efforts by Apple, dismissing the Fire is increasingly difficult to do so. In February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed tablets like the Kindle Fire as inferior:
A cheap product might sell some units … But then [consumers] get it home and use it and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone every day that they use it and they wind up not using it anymore.
No one knows for sure how much use the Kinde Fire is getting, but consumers certainly are buying it.
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