Panos Panay has a Diet Coke problem. It’s a topic that quickly comes up when we walk into the small interview room, where he offers me a choice of drinks and I mention that my partner has a similar addiction. After a brief conversation about the advantages of drinking plain water over diet coke, I knew his wife was less of a soda fan than I was, but I still had no idea how much the man was consuming per day.
This was Panay’s first opening event with members of the media since then He left Microsoft last year to lead Amazon’s devices and services team. “this feels like a Panos event” I thought as I walked into the event space at The Shed in New York.
The room was bathed in sunlight, with various neutral and pastel pink sofas and armchairs arranged in a vague semi-circle facing a vaguely elevated platform. Lavender and various greenery resembling baby’s breath were neatly arranged around the stage, giving the scene an overall softness.
There was a leather stool that looked big enough to sit on but not comfortable enough to relax on, and next to it was a smaller wooden end table where a solo water bottle sat. Panay did not sit down once during his 38-minute presentation. Clad in a black collared shirt, black jacket, black jeans and black shoes with brown trim, Panay brought his typical sentimental delivery to the Kindle launch event.
As usual, he didn’t hesitate to mention his family, showing a carefully taken photo of his daughter Bella reading a Kindle on the couch. He called out members of the media by name, greeted Lance Ulanoff in the front row, and asked if he had heard from David Pearce. At one point, he moved hand in hand to the middle row the new Kindle up to tech Youtuber Jacklyn Dallasasked him to repeatedly tap the screen to turn pages and see how fast he believed it was.
I say all of this to impress upon you that the Panos experience is engaging, engaging, and may even make you feel so enthralled that you may overlook the fact that it repeatedly calls. Kindle Scribe 2-in-1. It certainly took more patience than I would normally expect from a tech leader who spent almost a third of his presentation talking about the history of the Kindle and its relevance to people’s lives. Instead of thinking, “Go ahead, I want to hear about new devices without all this preamble,” I just laughed at the jokes, made eye contact, and related personal anecdotes. Even though I knew we were past the 38 minutes the speech promised to last, I didn’t mind that he was still talking.
Although, when we sat down to chat, I was able to ask him about 2-in-1s. The term brings to mind Surface tablets and iPads, not to mention the Surface Duo and Surface Neo that Panay introduced at a very similar Microsoft event years ago. Kindles? Not so much. But according to Panay, Kindle Scribe “does two things, and it does it pretty well. It turns out that it only does two things.”
People want to read on Kindles, but they also want to write on books. “Both experiences should stand on their own in a big way,” he said. “You can buy this device to write, or you can buy this device to read, and then you can bridge.”
But if the device tries to overdo it, it can get too complicated. When asked what’s next for Kindle Scribe and what challenges he faces, Panay said, “You have to be careful not to turn it into a Swiss army knife. This is probably the biggest problem – what is it no will be.”
“Customer focus at Amazon is off the charts,” Panay explained, adding that the team talks to users, reads reviews and learns how people use their products to better understand their needs. “Mainly for this team [it’s to] know what the customer needs, be passionate, make sure you deliver”.
“Let’s not try to reinvent things that people don’t need reinventing.”
The approach Panay brings to Amazon is one that takes into account his history (and his entire life) at Microsoft. He never mentions it outright, but I can’t help but wonder if he learned something from the company that announced the Surface Neo dual-screen laptop and didn’t actually release it.
Panay also said that in order to understand the needs of customers, Amazon should try to anticipate what they might want. “You also need to understand where the technology is going and have roadmaps,” he said. “You have to have the ingenuity and creativity that gets you where you’re going, so when people land, they have the next thing they need, and hopefully it was your product that got them there.”
“Let’s not try to reinvent things that people don’t need reinventing.”Panos Panay
The urge to predict these trends makes me nervous, especially at a time when every major company is rushing to incorporate generative AI features into their products. How should companies like Amazon resist the temptation to jump on deals and avoid producing products that are ultimately the result of useless hype? For Panay, the answer is patience.
“Patience is everything,” he said. “What is the right thing at the right time for the product? How is it useful? How elegant is that?” He admitted that “we are in an era where artificial intelligence is transformational. This is not fashion.” There are things AI can bring to Kindle Scribe and other products that can elevate them. But “it’s important and simple for me to make it useful for everyone.”
Kindle Scribe has two AI-powered notebook features that basically read your scribbles and turn them into something more readable and digestible. These aren’t groundbreaking concepts – I’ve seen at least 5 different companies launch aggregation tools in the last year. But Panay made it clear through personal anecdotes on stage that they are important to him and his staff. He doesn’t want to let people see his handwritten notes, but he will let them see the AI-edited version. I’m sure the rest of the world’s Kindle users will find these useful.
For now, Panay wants to perfect the Kindle Scribe experience. “You can never make anything perfect, I’m never satisfied. But now it’s so close that… you won’t be able to feel like a piece of paper, feel like you’re breaking, feel like you’re writing, you won’t be able to distract yourself.” During the introduction, she called him her favorite child (but later said she felt guilty about doing so).
There are many other children in the Amazon hardware family that Panay oversees. He’s not only responsible for the four Kindles launching today, including a new color reader called Colorsoft, but also for the company’s smart home, robotics, satellite, consumer robots and Alexa products, as well as Fire TV and tablets.
“It’s an eclectic group of products on some level, but it’s actually quite connected at the same time.” There are also things Panay can’t talk about on the record yet, but he says there’s “a lot of magic yet to be shared with the world.” In more realistic terms, it’s about seeing things “connected in ways that make a difference in people’s everyday lives in and out of the home.”
There are other ways that Kindle Scribe could evolve, which isn’t a stretch of the imagination. The most obvious is getting a color display, and Panay agreed that “it’s probably not a stretch at all,” before saying he couldn’t discuss future roadmaps. But I can certainly speculate.
While it’s interesting that Amazon is proposing a brand new name for Colorsoft, it suggests that it will be a separate product line, it would make sense for Colorsoft to be one-off and integrate color panels. to other existing Kindles in the future.
Another potential technological change for Kindles is making them foldable. To that end, Panay simply said, “It’s an interesting concept.” When I pointed out that he was no stranger to folding devices, he admitted that “I’m definitely not,” before saying, “We have a lot of concepts in the lab.”
Most importantly, he reiterates that he “doesn’t want to create technology for the sake of creating technology.” If the idea is sound, Panay is open to considering it. “But right now, keeping it simple is where we’re at.”
