Quote:
Originally Posted by RajS
Generally the view of people who've never started a business or taken taken a risk in my experience.
Businesses fail for many reasons, sometimes they have constraints that they simply cannot shirk which put them at a disadvantage. I've seen plenty of business simply outcompeted by others better or newer or richer without the people in them being in any way being lazy or complacent. Also businesses often make reasonable decisions - at the time - only to find that events overtake them and they're in a worse situation than a later entrant.
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Yes, sometimes things happen that even the best of us cannot overcome. But often business failures are not the consequences of such fateful circumstances, but rather in the postmortem can be traced to specific mistakes made by specific people.
For instance, I believe that the origins of Borders' failure lie in the crazy decision to outsource the web sales business to their direct competitor Amazon. Saved a few million in the short run, brought down a company worth hundreds of millions - in the long run. That is called a lack of vision.
Not all errors are fatal, from many the recovery is possible. But I don't see anything wrong with exposing and discussing business mistakes, and trying to learn from them.
What's wrong with pointing out that with proper investment of capital and human resources Sony Reader could have been where Amazon Kindle is now? Well, Amazon does have a much healthier biosphere to feed off, but Sony could have made an effort on par with B&N, or at least Kobo. Sony Readers were in Borders for 5 years, and yet most Borders sales associates had no idea how to use them, and what were the ebooks all about. Remember those little kiosks with locked glass doors and always stuck demo units? Compare it to the huge front-and-center nook kiosks. Compare one-event-a-year Sony marketing effort to the nook promoting effort by B&N. Hey, perhaps Sony could have been in B&N...
Sony was not out-competed because of circumstances beyond its control, oh no! It is being out-competed as a direct result of its own overcautious marketing policies.
And the thing about user communities. How much effort does it take for a company of this size to set up a customer relations type forum? Most modern companies with online sales and marketing presence do it. But not Sony. Why not Sony?