Panos Panay has a problem with Diet Coke. It’s a topic that came up to me as I walked into the small interview room, when he offered me a choice of beverages and I mentioned that my partner has a similar addiction. After a quick conversation on the benefits of drinking plain water over diet cola, I learned that his wife, like me, advocates drinking less soda, but I still had no idea how much the guy actually drinks in a day.
This was Panay’s first launch event with members of the media since he left Microsoft last year to lead Amazon’s devices and services team. And as I walked into the event space at The Shed in New York, I thought “This feels like a Panos event.”
The room was drenched in sunlight, with various neutral and pale pink couches and armchairs placed in a vague semicircle in front of a simple elevated stage. Neatly mixed greenery was placed around the stage along with lavender and what looked like baby breath, giving the scene a general softness.
On the stage was a leather stool that looked big but not comfortable enough to rest on, and next to it was a small wooden end table on which a water bottle rested. Panay did not sit once during his 38-minute presentation. Dressed in a black collared shirt, black jacket, black jeans and black shoes with brown trim, Panay showed his characteristic emotionality at the Kindle launch event.
As usual, he did not refrain from mentioning his family, showing a photo of his daughter Bella sitting on a couch reading a Kindle. He called out members of the media by name, saying hello to Lance Ulanoff seated in the front row and asking David Pierce if he could hear. At one point, he walked to the middle row and handed tech YouTuber Jacqueline Dallas a new Kindle, and asked her to scroll through pages by repeatedly tapping on the screen to see for herself how fast she thought it was.
I tell you all this to convince you that Panos’ experience is engaging, charming and can enchant you enough to overlook the fact that he repeatedly calls the Kindle Scribe a 2-in-1. It was certainly enough to give me more patience than usual for a tech leader who spent about a third of his presentation talking about the history of the Kindle and how it fits into people’s lives.
Instead of thinking “bring it on, I want to hear about new devices without any preamble,” I simply laughed at the jokes, made eye contact and shared personal anecdotes. And although I knew we were well past the 38 minutes he’d promised to speak for, I didn’t mind that he was still speaking.
When we sat down to talk, though, I was able to ask him questions about 2-in-1s. The term brings to my mind images of Surface tablets and iPads, not to mention the Surface Duo and Surface Neo, which Panay launched at a remarkably similar Microsoft event years ago. Kindle? Not so much. But according to Panay, the Kindle Scribe “does two things, and it does it remarkably well. Turns out it only does two things.”
People want to read on their Kindles, but they also want to write in books. “Both experiences should stand on their own in a great way,” he said. “You can buy this device to write, or you can buy this device to read and then you bridge that.”
But if a device tries to be too much, it can become too complicated. When I asked what’s next for the Kindle Scribe and what challenges it faces, Panay said, “You have to be careful that it doesn’t become a Swiss Army knife. That’s probably the biggest challenge — what it’s not going to be.”
“At Amazon, the focus on the customer is off the charts,” Panay explained, adding that the team talks to users, reads reviews and studies how people use their products to better understand their needs. “Basically, for this team, [it’s] knowing what the customer needs, being obsessive, making sure you deliver that.”
“Let’s not try to reinvent things that people don’t need to reinvent.”
The approach Panay has taken at Amazon calls to mind his history at Microsoft (and his entire life). They never explicitly mentioned it, but I can’t help wondering if they learned something from the company that announced the Surface Neo dual-screen laptop and didn’t actually release it.