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Originally Posted by darryl
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Amazon may well continue to dominate for a long long time if it continues its present culture and its competitors continue to act so stupidly,
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I know the narrative is Amazon is super perfect and their competitors are super stupid, but neither is really true. Amazon found a niche that was not being filled (the one stop online market place) and filled it. Like many companies that found that niche (Microsoft, Apple, Wal-Mart come to mind), once the brand name is in the public's mind, it's going to be difficult to overtake them in that niche. But Amazon does indeed have their blind spots, just like Microsoft, Apple and Wal-Mart and they have made their mistakes.
One thing to keep in mind in this forum is that setting up an online bookstore is a whole lot easier than setting up a complete online market place. Anyone who gets into the online bookstore market basically has three hurdles.
First, they need the store front. In my personal opinion, this is where Amazon is most vulnerable. A store front that solves or at least better enables discover-ability can bring a lot of people in. A store front that is a me too store front, a la Kobo, probably won't get much traction. During the word processor wars in the 90's, it was said that you have to improve someone's experience by an order of magnitude to get people to change. I think that is true is the ebook store front business as well.
Second, they need the contracts with the multitude of publishers and copyright holders. To a great extent, this is the primary issue. Building up the inventory such that they all the books that people actually want to buy. I suspect that they would need all the major publishers and authors plus the backlist to be viable. They would need to solve this before they even think about tackling the indies.
Third, they need to solve the device problem, i.e. do they want to worry about devices that are locked into a specific store (i.e. kindle and nook). Is having good reading app that allows people to buy and download books good enough or do they need to enable people to read ebooks they already own? For that matter, do they need to provide a unique reading device a la the kindle and nook? The key is making it easy to buy and read. My guess is that a good app on the top tablets will be enough to get your foot in the door and probably should be the focus. But once again, you have to solve the buy and read issue.
Neither Apple's iPhone nor Google's android were the very first smart phones. They were just the first smart phones that merged the phone and personal assistant well enough and in a flexible enough package to allow the customers to take them in unexpected directions. If the jailbreak community hadn't convinced Jobs to open up the iPhone to developers, it probably wouldn't have taken off like it did.