![]() He rejected the idea, constantly suggesting new ones for complicated features, like the notion that customers’ annotations of books should be backed up on Amazon’s servers. The Lab126 team repeatedly urged Bezos to make their project easier by considering a Wi-Fi-only connection for the Kindle. Qualcomm, which was set to provide the wireless chips, was sued by a competitor, Broadcom, and for months was enjoined by a judge from selling its wares in the U.S. The black-and-white displays from E Ink, an offshoot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab that makes screens resembling the printed page and requiring very little power, would look good for one month and then degrade alarmingly. Stone reports that the effort to develop the first Kindle took more than three years. “I thought it was insane, I really did,” Parekh recalls. Bezos insisted that customers should never have to know the wireless connection was there or even pay for access. He also didn’t want to force customers to connect the device to a PC, so the only alternative was to build cellular access into the device, the equivalent of embedding a wireless phone in the hardware. Amazon’s founder wanted his new e-reading device to be drop-dead simple to use and argued that configuring devices to Wi-Fi networks was too complicated for non-tech-savvy users. ![]() It also had to contend with the unfettered imagination of Bezos. Stone reports that Lab126 was eventually given nearly unlimited resources. When the search division moved to the former offices of a Palo Alto law firm, Lab126 moved with them and took up residence in the old law library. The group piggybacked on A9′s infrastructure for most of the next year. People who worked for Lab126 in those early years recall it as a loosely managed startup. ![]()
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