I think it's bold of Amazon to launch essentially a minimum viable product and beat Apple to the punch. Now they have customers and are getting meaningful feedback to make future improvements. You rarely see this outside of Apple and startups. I'm glad to see Apple running into some real competition.
Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time required:
The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported at release. These missing features led to hackers "jailbreaking" their phones which added these missing features. Official software updates slowly added these features.
Looking back now they clearly did the right thing. In articles at the time when journalists did a feature comparisons it lost. But when people and journalists actually used it - it was awesome. I argue a product can be both a MVC and have simple, powerful, useful, polished features. Just look at the ipod and iphone (yeah similar reviews happened for ipod. See the infamous Slashdot quote).
Another example is the 1st generation iPod. Did just enough to solidify market share, then started evolving. You don't see people ooh and ahhing over a wheel anymore now that we are firmly onto touch pads.
Edit: Another example is iTunes (why couldn't you buy things directly on your device) or their office productivity suite.
I mean I'd hardly consider the original iPhone a minimum viable product. Smart phones had been around for years, and what the iPhone did was redefine the smart phone. I guess in some weird sense you could say that it was a minimum viable product for the future of other products that were like it, but you could say that for any product. In general, I would definitely not typify Apple as a company that gets to the fight first, but rather one that changes the fight when it gets there. That was true of the iPhone in the smart phone market, true of the iPod in the mp3 market, true of the iPad in the tablet market, and will likely be true of whatever special sauce Apple is planning for mobileme in the virtual locker market. My point is that Apple is not a company that throws out a product into consumer space with the knowledge that it is incomplete and seeking tons of consumer feedback. They release extremely polished products to a market, often with what I would argue is an unparalleled mastery of minimalism in their features (in terms of leaving a lot out of their products and only keeping in what they deem absolutely necessary to most users), which could be confused for minimum viability if you didn't know better. I would suggest Google as a better example of a big company that often releases products with the intention of quickly updating them once they start getting feedback. Facebook might be another less convincing example.
