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Originally Posted by guitarizt
It's basically this bold part. There's also some problems you can run into where just directly throwing money at problems that come up won't work if management doesn't know what they're doing. Throwing more money at some problems can be detrimental as well like Daniel Pink says in his TED talk and in his book Drive.
The US market is way more important than the Canadian market. California alone has more people than all of Canada. I'm not hating on Canada. There's a greater chance I move to Vancouver in 4-6 years than that I stay here in the US. I also wish Kobo's customer service and management was better because they made an awesome ereader that's half a year ahead of everything else, but poor customer service and lack of availability in US retail stores are big negatives.
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But it's not just about the Canadian market. The Kobo generally beats the Kindle in availability in lots of other markets. (And the sort of second class citizen mentality that Amazon has for much of the world outside the US particularly when it comes to the Kindle but also with much of their digital content strategy is off-putting.) And while this is harder to quantify and isn't something I've looked in to that well, the Kobo ebook store also seems to often be as good as if not better than the Kindle in many places besides Canada. In addition, due to the support of ePub, the Kobo often has better support for books from libraries. Frankly, as annoying as it may be to US customers, I'm not that surprised Kobo isn't desperately trying gain a major foot hold in the US market, I think the evidence has shown in many areas that it's not easy and you can often waste a lot of money and get nothing from it for a variety of reasons. (I mean even in the eink reader world, consider B&N.) Heck as a post in another thread has shown, you even have to be careful about who you partner with and where you put your warehouses and offices or else you have to pay sales tax for some states whereas your competitors doing large amounts of business in those states get away scot free and people complain about your prices because of that. Plus according to various reports, eInk ereaders sales are stagnating in the US.) I admit I'm biased since I don't live in the US but all in all, I think there are good reasons why Kobo may not want to spend too much time or money trying to crack the US market and why instead they may want to concentrate and the various other markets out there and with the rise and increasing importance of various markets particularly the developing world, we are seeing ever more of this in many different areas.