Lovely post by Alexis Madrigal.

All of this information (aside from the value judgment) was roughly accurate, but slightly worse than the reality of Amazon’s products. These reports helped calibrate people’s (particularly bloggers’) expectations a bit below what Amazon would actually announce. The Fire came out at $199 and its OS and web browsing have been an early hit. People are surprised by the speed of the machine and its promised “cloud-enhanced browsing.” Crucially, too, Amazon held a very big punch — the $79 Kindle — even though they could easily have thrown it.

Tactically this morning, Bloomberg got to publish the Kindle Fire details just ahead of other media, mostly so that tech writers not at the live event could extract details for posts while the livebloggers were listening to Bezos. Amazon got its full narrative out there quick, but gave plenty of tweetable factoids just to the livebloggers. The whole thing was executed perfectly.

You may recognize this strategy, which has been perfected by a certain Cupertino company. Apple always seems to have some way of both putting information out there to get buzz going, but also holding back a key and buzzworthy set of details. It’s clear that Amazon was taking notes.