Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Seattle salaries aren't much lower and Lab126 staffing has long been pretty large. These days it's enormous.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...e-the-r-d-race
The issue isn't the absolute numbers at the back end, per se, but rather the management of that staff. Those 1600 employees should have been able to earn their keep if properly deployed and managed. If they were over-staffed, under-utilized, or over-paid that would be on B&N management. Same as it is on their management that their website has long been substandard or that they had to buy back Microsoft's investment in Nook for non-performance.
Plenty of companies deal with those tech issues every day without incurring massive losses year after year after year. It doesn't take a decade of fumbling around to figure those things out. |
True, but Amazon also lost money for over a decade before they realized the real money is in advertising and web services. According to their 10-k filing all their profits came from advertising and AWS. Their retail division, including Kindle, is still unprofitable. It's possible this is by choice for tax reasons. In any case, when you receive billions of dollars from other revenue sources you can afford luxuries other companies (like Borders, B&N) don't have such as drone testing.
B&N's mismanagement was terrific but they didn't have the time to recover as they couldn't afford the years of R&D needed for expansion/growth.