Quote:
Originally Posted by sbroome
I just feel like none of these big companies ever innovate, then they wonder why they get left behind as they force customers into a "them or us" situation. Retailers are often the same. If Borders and Barnes and Nobles had "put their money" early on into their online facet, wouldn't they have dominated online book sales and the ereader market? Probably, but they didn't, so somebody else took from them.
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Both borders and B&n tried to compete with Amazon fairly early on and failed. As I said in my earlier post, it's not enough to just have the idea; you have to be able to execute almost perfectly. They weren't able to - not because it didn't occur to them, or because they were lazy, but because what Amazon does is really hard.
On the other, B&N has done a great job with e-books, and moved pretty quickly once Amazon demonstrated that it was a mainstream market. They undercut the Kindle on price (initially), and quickly surpassed Sony to be the #2 e-book retailer in the US and have been able - in a fairly short time - to offer substantially the same books as Amazon. (They have probably also benefitted from the Agency plan).
They beat Amazon to market with a 7" tablet by a year, (although they are hampered by not having Amazon's video infrastructure).
I think their larger structural problems have been caused by the fact that they significantly overbuilt in the 90's and early 2000's - it remains to be seen whether Borders' failure will give them breathing room in the still dominant paper book market.