Amazon’s Founder to Buy The Washington Post

Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto AgencyJeffrey P. Bezos, left, the founder of Amazon.com, and Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month.

The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a deal that has shocked the industry.

Who Just Bought The Washington Post? The entrance of The Washington Post building on Monday.

Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff about the sale late Monday afternoon. They had gathered together in the newspaper’s auditorium at the behest of the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, his niece.

“I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders),” Mr. Graham said in a written statement.

In the auditorium, he closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad — except, he said, “for me.”

The announcement was greeted by what many staff members described as “shock,” a reaction shared in newsrooms across the country as one of the crown jewels of newspapers was surrendered by one of the industry’s royal families.

In Mr. Bezos, The Post will have a very different owner, a technologist whose fortunes have risen in the last dozen years even as those of The Post and most newspapers have struggled. Through Amazon, the retailing giant, he has helped revolutionize the way people around the world consume — first books, then expanding to all kinds of goods and more recently in online storage, electronic books and online video, including a recent spate of original programming.

In the meeting, Mr. Graham stressed that Mr. Bezos would purchase The Post in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Amazon the company. The $250 million deal includes all of the publishing businesses owned by The Washington Post Company, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.

The Washington Post company plans to hold on to Slate magazine, The Root.com and Foreign Policy. According to the release, Mr. Bezos has asked Ms. Weymouth to remain at The Post along with Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager; Martin Baron, executive editor; and Fred Hiatt, editor of the editorial page.

Mr. Bezos, who did not attend the meeting at The Post on Monday, said in a statement that he had known Mr. Graham for the past decade and said about Mr. Graham that “I do not know a finer man.” Ms. Weymouth said that in negotiating this deal, Mr. Bezos made it clear he was not purely focused on profits.

The sale, at a price that would have been unthinkably low even a few years ago, represents the end of eight decades of ownership by the Graham family of The Post since Eugene Meyer bought The Post at auction on June 1, 1933. His son-in-law Phillip L. Graham served as president of the paper from 1947 until his death in 1963. Then Graham’s widow, Katharine Graham, oversaw the paper through the publication of the Pentagon Papers alongside The New York Times and its coverage of Watergate, the political scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and also a starring role for the newspaper in the film, “All The President’s Men.”

The Post’s daily circulation peaked in 1993 with 832,332 average daily subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But like most newspapers, it has suffered greatly from circulation and advertising declines. By March, the newspaper’s daily circulation had dropped to 474,767.

The company became pressed enough for cash that Ms. Weymouth announced in February that it was looking to sell its flagship headquarters. According to a regulatory filing associated with the sale, Mr. Bezos will pay rent to The Post Company on the space for up to three years.

Michael D. Shear, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of the founder of Amazon.com. He is Jeffrey P. Bezos, not Jeffrey K.

In Germany, a Union Culture Clashes With Amazon’s Labor Practices

But across the Atlantic — nein, non, no.

Even as President Obama spoke about middle-class jobs last week at an Amazon warehouse in Tennessee, Amazon was facing strikes at warehouses in Germany, its second-biggest market. Unions there say the company has imported American-style business practices — in particular, an antipathy to organized labor — that stand at odds with European norms.

“In Germany, the idea that warehouse workers are going to be getting opposition from an employer when it comes to the right to organize, that’s virtually unheard-of,” said Marcus Courtney, a technology and communications department head at Uni Global Union, a federation of trade unions based in Nyon, Switzerland. “It puts Amazon out in left field.”

Amazon is hardly out there alone, however. Large American technology companies are increasingly running into obstacles as they expand in Europe. For Facebook and Google, the running issue is privacy. Google was fined this year by German authorities for illegally collecting personal data while creating its Street View mapping service, after facing minimal sanctions over Street View at home. Meanwhile, European privacy regulators are considering tough regulations to protect consumers on the Internet, a direct challenge to Google, Facebook and other online companies that mine personal data.

Antitrust officials in Europe are scrutinizing Apple’s relationships with wireless carriers, as well as Google’s competitive practices. And Google, Apple and Amazon have all been criticized by European lawmakers for tactics that help them minimize their tax bills.

Amazon has been criticized for its working conditions in the United States — but not nearly to the same extent as in Europe. On the surface, Amazon’s labor problems in Germany revolve around wages.

The union says workers in warehouses in two small German cities are properly classified as retail employees, and should be paid at the higher rate required for people who work in department stores and other retail outlets. Amazon says they are more properly classified as warehouse workers, and paid at a lower rate.

The subtext, though, is Amazon’s opposition to unions in its warehouses as a general principle, because the company fears unions will slow down the kind of behind-the-scenes innovation that has propelled its growth.

Dave Clark, the company’s vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, says Amazon views unions as intermediaries that will want to have a say on everything from employee scheduling to changes in processes for handling and packaging orders. Amazon prizes its ability to quickly introduce changes like these into its warehouses to improve the experience of its customers, he said.

Last year, the company spent $775 million to buy a manufacturer of robots that it plans to eventually deploy in its warehouses, though it has not said when they would come to Germany. The last thing it wants is to have to get approval from unions for such changes.

“This really isn’t about higher wages,” Mr. Clark said. “It isn’t a cost question for us. It’s about what our relationship is with our people.”

“We’re still a developing industry,” he added — despite the fact that Amazon posted revenue of $15.7 billion in the last quarter and the company is enjoying a buoyant stock price.

In the United States, Amazon successfully thwarted efforts to unionize. Over a decade ago, Mr. Courtney of Uni Global led an unsuccessful effort in the company’s home state of Washington to organize Amazon’s customer service representatives.

Two years ago, an investigative article by The Morning Call newspaper in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley chronicled poor working conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the state, including instances where it stationed paramedics outside to take heat-stressed workers to the emergency room. Amazon says it has addressed the problem by installing air-conditioning in all of its facilities.

More recently, a firm that provides temporary employees for Amazon warehouses is defending itself in a class-action suit that claims the firm shortchanged workers on pay as they waited in security lines to exit warehouses.

Jonathan Barnes, a spokesman for the staffing firm named in the suit, Integrity Staffing Solutions, declined to comment.

But it is a different story in Germany, where the powerful labor movement behind the Amazon strikes traces its roots back more than two centuries.

Mr. Courtney, the Swiss-based head of the federation of trade unions, said other American tech giants, including I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard, have been more tolerant than Amazon of unions in their European operations.

And the strikes in Germany raise especially knotty problems for the company, which has ambitious expansion plans there.

Bits Blog: Amazon’s Boom in Cloud Partners

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services is growing quickly.

You can tell when a technology is really taking hold. In addition to picking up customers, it generates other businesses that require their own care and feeding. And some of those businesses can illustrate how much more business is out there.

On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services is having a meeting for developers and customers in San Francisco. It is the fourth of 12 such meetings Amazon is holding worldwide; the first was in New York on April 18 and the last will be in São Paulo, Brazil, on July 30. In between, Amazon will be in Delhi and Berlin, among other cities.

These gatherings will include lots of cheerleading and information from Amazon Web Services directed toward prospective customers and will also have meetings for companies that work closely with Web services on things like databases, security, and application development. About 650 companies are partners with Amazon Web Services, and there are another 723 consulting partners that attract customers looking to tie the unit into their business.

Amazon Web Services is growing fast. It has over 1,600 job openings on its Web site and accounted for the vast majority of the $798 million in “other” revenue Amazon reported in the quarter that ended March 31. Still, it wants those other companies to be really active on its behalf so it can remain the leader in so-called “public clouds,” or cloud computing services for rent.

A look at one of the partners, Eucalyptus Systems, illustrates the kind of scale the Amazon service operates on. Eucalyptus provides cloud software that is used primarily for testing big Amazon service projects. That is, even before some companies go on Amazon Web Services, they build mini-Web services clouds.

One customer of Eucalyptus, AppDynamics, tests new software for Netflix, the largest customer of the Amazon service. “Even before their software is on A.W.S., we are categorizing and analyzing over a billion transactions,” said Thomas Morse, director of information technology and operations at App Dynamics. “Netflix inflicts a unique kind of pain on a system, with tens of thousands of computing nodes supporting millions of actions a minute.”

Eucalyptus, which began life as an open-source project for people to build their own clouds, moved into supporting Amazon Web Services once Amazon captured such a large share of the market. “They’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers now,” said Marten Mickos, chief executive of Eucalyptus. Because almost all of these customers are companies, he said, “it is used by millions of people. It gives them meaning for a number of years.”

Last week the data storage giant EMC and its affiliate VMware, which are worried about the Amazon service, announced creation of Pivotal, a company that includes its own Amazon-type cloud. This summer, Google is likely to announce an expansion of its own Amazon Web Services-type unit, called Google Compute Engine.

Both Pivotal and Google are working hard on partner networks of their own. Elsewhere, a wealth of consortia with the word “open” in their names are looking for their own openings. Many of these companies are heavily backed by older incumbent companies.

Mr. Mickos, who sold MySQL, a relational database management system, to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008, sees the completion as a three-way competition. “There are the old guys, like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Cisco, who are trying to get into new stuff,” he says. “There are the server virtualization companies, like VMware and Citrix, who say the cloud is just more virtualization of your existing equipment. Then there are the pure plays, like A.W.S. and Google.”

On Monday, Eucalyptus introduced a new version of its product that allows customers to test even bigger projects before they move to the Amazon service. In the future, Mr. Mickos said, the company would look to make its product compatible with Google’s service as well.

“It is the most interesting strategic thing we can do,” he said. “Amazon is the standard now, Google will compete. There is an old world that won’t cross over.”

Amazon’s Profit Falls as It Spends Heavily on Distribution Centers

On Thursday, Amazon told investors it’s still not time for a drink.

The Internet retailer reported a 37 percent decrease in profits for the first three months of the year.

That drop was expected, and it was even a bit less than some investors had forecast, which initially helped lift the company’s shares slightly in after-hours trading. The stock eventually ended up falling about 3 percent in after-hours trading.

Amazon said its net income for the first quarter, which ended March 31, fell to $82 million, or 18 cents a share, from $130 million, or 28 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue jumped 22 percent to $16.07 billion from $13.18 billion.

While the company’s profit was better than analysts had expected, its revenue fell slightly short. Wall Street analysts expected Amazon to report earnings of 9 cents a share and revenue of $16.16 billion, according to an average of their estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Amazon previously told analysts to expect its sales to grow to between $15 billion and $16.6 billion, or somewhere from 15 to 26 percent.

“It’s more of the same from Amazon,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company.

Mr. Sebastian added that the waves of investments that Amazon was making were unlikely to abate soon. “That’s going to be a continuing trend,” he said.

The seeming indifference of many investors to Amazon’s slim profits shows how much more effective the company has been at articulating its vision of future opportunities to Wall Street than another tech favorite, Apple.

Apple, which made a profit 116 times bigger than that of Amazon last quarter, has been plagued by investor doubts about its growth prospects, driving its stock down 33 percent over the l ast year.

Amazon’s shares are up 38 percent in that period.

Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said investors had been reassured by comments from Amazon management that suggested the company was not being hurt as much by weakness in European economies as another e-commerce giant, eBay. “That’s an acknowledgment that the growth outlook for Amazon remains quite robust,” he said.

Amazon is spending heavily on fulfillment centers to speed delivery of physical goods to customers. It is also investing aggressively in data centers to expand its Amazon Web Services business, which provides start-ups and big corporate clients with computers and bandwidth they can rent as needed for their online initiatives.

Then there are the consumer devices that are becoming an increasingly important part of Amazon’s plan to deliver media electronically to customers. The company’s Kindle e-readers are now a full-blown family of tablet computers, which it sells for little or no profit, with the goal of making money over the long term by selling books, movies, music and other services.

Amazon is also developing a television set-top box that it is expected to announce in the fall, a device that could give its video services a more meaningful audience in living rooms. The company recently introduced pilot episodes for 14 original comedy and children’s television shows and is soliciting viewer feedback to determine which ones will be turned into full series.

In a conference call, Tom Szkutak, Amazon’s chief financial officer, repeated an oft-stated Amazon motto about its priorities. “We believe putting customers first is the only way to create lasting value for shareholders,” he said.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Uploading Music to Amazon's Cloud

Can I use songs I bought from other online music stores with Amazon Cloud Player?

The Amazon Music Importer, which pulls music tracks from your computer into the Amazon Cloud Player, has a few limitations on the types of files that can be used with the service. If the purchased songs are regular MP3 files or unrestricted AAC files (which have the .m4a extension), they should work with the Cloud Player.

Songs purchased from online stores that have built-in copy protection (also known as digital rights management or D.R.M.) are not supported, however. Songs with the .m4p file extension from Apple’s iTunes Store — purchased before the company dropped D.R.M. in early 2009 — will not work. Other formats that will not work include Dolby Digital (.ac3) and Monkey’s Audio (.ape) files. Audiobooks, ringtones, podcasts and music files larger than 100 megabytes are also not supported.

The Amazon Music Importer does accept several other file types for uploading, as long as the tracks can be matched in Amazon’s catalog. These formats include Windows Media Audio (.wma), Ogg Vorbis (.ogg), Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac), Audio Interchange File Format (.aiff) and uncompressed WAV files. Amazon has more information about importing music into the Cloud Player here.

Wal-Mart Says It Will Stop Selling Amazon’s Kindle

Target said in May that it would stop selling Kindles, though other stores, including Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot, said Thursday they would continue to carry the devices.

Wal-Mart did not specify why it was discontinuing its Kindle sales, but analysts said it was not hard to decipher, given that the retailer will still sell similar devices from companies like Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble and Samsung.

Physical retailers have been worried about customers who browse in stores and then buy from online competitors instead. Displaying the new Kindles encourages that behavior, analysts said.

While earlier black-and-white Kindles were good only for reading digital books, the newer Kindle Fire, introduced in 2011, can be used for e-books, movies, games, and potentially anything Amazon sells, thanks to a built-in Web browser.

“The Kindle Fire is the Trojan horse,” said Andrew Rhomberg, the chief executive of Jellybooks, an e-book recommendation site. “It’s a shopping platform that covers so many more categories than e-books. It affects Wal-Mart in a different way than the early Kindles and e-readers did.”

Colin Gillis, a technology analyst for BGC Financial, said that by selling Kindles, Wal-Mart was “encouraging its customers to step into that ecosystem.”

“Every time you pick up your Kindle, they’re trying to get you to buy patio furniture” at Amazon, Mr. Gillis said. “If I were Wal-Mart, I certainly would not be encouraging my customers to go down the path of owning a Kindle and buying things from Amazon.”

Moreover, the Kindle line, and most tablets, are only marginally profitable for retailers, said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“A lot of them have had it with tablets other than the iPad,” she said. “They’re not high-margin products, and other than Apple ones, no one is selling these devices in great volumes anyway. For Wal-Mart to drop Amazon is more of a symbolic blow rather than a substantive one.”

However, if more retailers back away from selling the Kindle, Amazon will lose valuable physical display space that it cannot match with a Web site, exposure that becomes especially important during the holiday shopping season.

“Amazon still needs a way to get the hardware into people’s hands,” Mr. Gillis said.

Amazon declined to comment on Wal-Mart’s decision.

The low profit from Kindle sales and the threat of competition from Amazon raise the question of why retailers wanted to sell the device in the first place.

One reason is that technology companies and retailers tend to have relationships that quickly turn from cooperative to competitive.

“A lot of these technology companies look like they’re great friends in the beginning, and as they grow and add products, they move from friend to foe,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer of ShopRunner, an online-shopping service, and the former chief marketing officer of Circuit City.

She said that Amazon was a clear example of this, and Google, with its Wallet mobile-checkout product and its recent decision to charge retailers to be included in product searches, was another. Even Apple, with its Passbook system that allows mobile payments, and the expanding list of items sold via iTunes, should unnerve retailers that sell its products, Ms. Dias said.

Analysts also say that early on there were few alternatives to the Kindle. It was one of the first widely available e-book readers when it was introduced in 2007 for $399. Now, consumers can choose from dozens of basic black-and-white e-readers, some of them for less than $70, and a wide range of color tablets.

Wal-Mart will not order any more Kindles after its stock runs out, and Kindles will no longer be available at its Sam’s Club and walmart.com divisions along with Walmart stores, said Sarah Spencer, a spokeswoman. Wal-Mart’s decision, sent in a memo to employees, was first reported by Reuters.

Other big retailers, however, said they planned to continue carrying Kindles.

“We’ve seen good customer demand in our stores for those products,” said Jeff Haydock, a Best Buy spokesman. “Because we stand for choice, we look to bring in any of the latest technology and put it in our stores so customers can look at things, compare things and find the products that are best for them.”

At Office Depot, which added the Kindle Fire last winter, Mindy Kramer, a spokeswoman, said, “we saw this as the opportunity to really enhance our portfolio of e-readers and become a destination for these high-profile products.” Ms. Kramer added that the line’s wide range of prices appeals to shoppers.

Carrie McElwee, a Staples spokeswoman, declined to give specifics on Kindle sales or the company’s strategy with the products, but said that the store had expanded its selection as the offerings grew.

The items are also for sale at Radio Shack and at Tesco and Waterstones in Britain.

Ms. Rotman Epps said carrying Kindles fit into some retailers’ strategies, citing Best Buy’s efforts to market itself as tablet central. Ms. Dias, though, called those decisions “shortsighted.”

“They’re thinking about today’s sales,” she said. “Why support the guy that’s trying to put you out of business?”

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 14, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Amazon.com’s new 7-inch touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, misstated its release date. It will be available today, not Sept. 24.

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 14, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Amazon.com’s new 7-inch touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, misstated its release date. It will be available today, not Sept. 24.

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

An earlier version of this column also misstated the date the 7-inch Fire HD becomes available. It will be ready Sept. 14, not Sept. 24.

Amazon’s Cloud Is Disrupted by a Summer Storm

The cutting edge of the Web just bled a little.

On Friday night, lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon’s cloud computing service, called Amazon Web Services, which hundreds of companies use for data storage and computation. Well-known sites like Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were not accessible for hours. There was little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe.

The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.

Besides Internet-connected computers, tablets and smartphones, which people rely on daily, consumers and businesses are connected to the Web through everything from cars and appliances to utility monitors and surveillance cameras. How well the systems behind these are built, and how they handle unforeseen disruptions, will increasingly affect the larger economy.

Amazon has built a thriving business in cloud computing, with a range of customers including Intercontinental Hotels, Fox Entertainment, Unilever, Spotify, as well as 187 government agencies and hundreds of small start-ups looking for the cheapest possible computing.

None of these big customers reported any service disruptions. While it was not clear if they were using the Amazon center that was crippled, analysts said the disruption would cause renewed scrutiny of their dependence on cloud computing.

“The way companies view it is in terms of reliability generally,” said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at McKinsey & Company. Big customers of Amazon, he said, “have the opportunity to shape the marketplace and make demands that make products better. They will push for improvements.”

They will also have another option. On Thursday, Google said it would offer computing over the Internet at half the price of Amazon.

The weekend’s disruption happened after a lightning storm caused the power to fail at the Amazon Web Services center in Northern Virginia containing thousands of computer servers. For reasons Amazon was still unsure of on Sunday, the data center’s backup generator also failed.

By midday Saturday, Amazon said in a statement that it had restored service “to most of our impacted customers, and continue to work to restore service to our remaining impacted customers,” adding, “we will share more details on this event in the coming days.” The company had no further comment.

It was at least the second major failure for Amazon in that area. In April 2011, a problem in Amazon’s networking at a nearby data center took down a number of applications and popular Web sites, including Reddit and Quora, for more than a day.

To be sure, Amazon Web Services held up better than many utilities affected by the storm, which left more than four million homes and businesses without power on the East Coast. By Sunday, some Instagram customers in the Washington area could, through their cellphones, share pictures on the Web before they had lights or safe drinking water.

Netflix, along with Pinterest and Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment Sunday. Netflix was able to restore service in a couple of hours. Many more Amazon customers, including the small start-ups that make up the bulk of its customers, did not report any problems, but may have scrambled to make sure their systems were secure.

“We were late at work, playing an online video game that went down, then got a notification from our own system that it was starting to fail,” said Benjamin Coe, the founder of Attachments.me, a start-up in San Francisco that connects e-mail attachments to online data storage services. “We had built for redundancy, but our system failed in two areas, making it hard for the third to work.”

Mr. Coe said he stayed up until 4 a.m. fixing the problem. It was, he said, the price of working cheaply with a service that enabled his six-person company to potentially serve millions of customers, who he said would be understanding about brief shutdowns.

“For a consumer product that is free, there is an understanding all around that things can fail occasionally,” he said. “If you were flying a plane or something, this would be totally unacceptable.”

The ability to deal with failures has long been a feature of any computing system, but like much else in the cloud, there are no common standards to guide how much protection against disaster is enough. Many start-ups appear not to take advantage of more expensive redundancy features in Amazon, like swapping data between the East Coast and West Coast Amazon facilities.

Bigger companies are moving to the cloud as well, but may now look at Amazon Web Services as a stopgap as much as a primary provider.

“Maybe 15 percent of our customers now keep their data with us in the cloud, but in three years that could be 75 percent,” said Carl Bass, chief executive of Autodesk, a leading maker of design software. Most of that data is stored on Amazon servers for now, he said, but the company is weighing managing its own cloud, as customers use cheap cloud computing to generate huge numbers of design simulations.

“It’ll cost $10 million to get started, and we’ll probably still rely on A.W.S. to handle big workloads,” he said. “We’re going to need tools for infinite computing.”