Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
They really need a better breed of challenger.
Maybe Google ought to buy WalMart.
(Oh, and of course, the publishing establishment thinks the whole move is about them.)
|
Very true. At the moment it is Amazon first and daylight second. If I was put in charge of some of Amazon's competitors both in publishing and in other industries and told to wreck their businesses as quickly as I could without being too obvious I could not have done as well as the incumbents. In publishing B&N is a classic illustration.
And of course publishing is now only a tiny proportion of Amazon's business. Amazon has made an eminently rational and appropriate decision which the publishers were incapable of foreseeing because they never seem to contemplate that sometimes innovation requires that one arm of a business acts in a way that potentially does some damage to another arm. At least if long term survival is important.