Amazon came out with their quarterly results a few days ago, and unlike the mindbogglingly stellar announcement by Apple, these have fallen far short of the expectations. Even though both the profits and revenues are up as compared to the same quarter of the previous year, those have not been able to come close to the expectations of most analysts. A big part of what made the expectations so high was the seemingly impressive sales of the Kindle Fire. (No one knows for sure how many of these small tablets are pushed out by Amazon as the company is characteristically vague about these figures.)

None of this is terribly surprising for anyone who’s been following Amazon for long periods of time. Jeff Bezos has been on the record saying that their whole vision works in “five to seven years installments”, which are, unfortunately, not favored by the Wall Street traders. Amazon has been investing into a lot of online property and infrastructure, and is more than happy operating with slim to non-existent profit margins. It’s a very different attitude and culture from most other tech companies, but in my opinion it’s one of the reasons why Amazon is still one of the few companies standing from the early heady days of the internet land-grab bonanza.

Whatever happens to Amazon’s stock in the upcoming weeks and months, Kindle fire has certainly been poised to reshape the tablet industry. Even though its specs and features are far less than spectacular, it has enough of what many users expect from a simple media-consuming device that appeals to the wide segment of the public. There is a reason why it has become the number one selling product on Amazon across all of the categories. Kindle Fire is certainly not an iPad killer (according to Apple its introduction did not have any effect on iPad sales), but its certainly managed to stake a niche position for itself and become the most successful Android tablet thus far.

However, the success of Kindle Fire is probably not unequivocally good news for the rest of the Android world. This is because Amazon has forked android development and launched its own version of this mobile operating system. Amazon is surpassing the usual Android development channels, and even selling Android apps through the Amazon’s store instead of through the more conventional Android Market. This bodes well for the long-term Amazon digital content sales, but is worrisome to many an Android developer – one has to deal and worry about yet another compatibility standard. Google folks are also probably not too thrilled about this.