Did Apple Lose Out With The Kindle?

There have been a number of individuals who have said that there is no way the Kindle will make a dent in any market at all. And to be fair, as Steve Jobs once pointed out, there is not enough active readers to warrant the sale of such an eBook device. But flash forward to today and we see a small number of Kindles selling a lot of books. So this begs the question - did Apple miss the boat on this? Or perhaps, does it even matter?

I am of the mind that Apple is not in the book business. So when Jobs spoke ill of the Kindle concept, he was making a statement without fulling understanding the fact that Amazon does have a business concept that goes beyond their current longtail approach seen widely today.

It appears that Amazon, once again, has shown us that you can make a mint from a limited number of users despite the fact that it would seem unlikely if anyone else had tried to project this earlier. Does this mean that Amazon can catch lightening in a bottle again with other products, such as an MP3 player? Not in a million years. This worked for them because unlike Apple, books and reader habits are something that Amazon knows all too well.