Quote:
Originally Posted by pl001
Too late for me. And not necessarily a great move from a business perspective. Like MV64 mentioned, they made money on the store, not the hardware. Now they won't have any means to make a decent profit on it. This was a desperate move by a failing company.
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It is a good move to get *away* from being a failing company.
They have been taking a bath on hardware. Namely, they already paid a ton to have them built and shipped and sales were (by all reports) awful. They tried discounting, they tried BoGo, they tried all sorts of way to get *some* money out off that sunk cost. This way they move the hardware at the *original* price and recover as much cash as possible.
It also strongly suggests there will not be a future Nook tablet and that when they talk of content sales they mean ebooks. After all, their app store is sparse, the video is barely launching, and music non-existent. And they no longer can afford to fool around pretending they can be Apple. They need to be Nook and they need to sell ebooks.
That is what Microsoft is paying them for, that is what Pearson paid for, that is what is actually bringing in money.
It's Triage plain and simple.
They are not on the edge of disaster but they can clearly see the cliff from where they are. It's got them concentrating on what matters.
As Samuel Johnson said: "When a man knows he is to be hanged...it concentrates his mind wonderfully."