Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Your argument is in fact supported by Jeff Bezos's reply quoted in the OP. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Had B&N read and taken his comment seriously who knows where we may have been today.
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Hindsight is only part of the story here.
Part of the humor is that the article was laughably wrong even in the light of known 1997 facts.
1- The B&N website was far from being as usable as the Amazon site. Even then it was understood that IT consultants routinely overpromised and under-delivered. That marketing had the habit of making promises their staff was unable to keep was a common theme on Dilbert. Throwing money at a website problem was mocked by even IBM a couple years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHTNu5UQvH4
2- In 1997 a deal with Yahoo would send far more traffic to your site than a deal with the NYT. Yahoo was still relevant then.
3- The writer assumed that bestsellers was the heart of online sales when even then it was backlist driving Amazon's growth. That was why ABE was one of Amazon's early acquisitions and by 2000 they were being vilified for selling used books online.
4- The author assumed Amazon depended on the traditional "special order" delivery process that took even B&N weeks to deliver deep backlist when from day one, Amazon did its own pickup at the distributor warehouse and did its own shipping. By 1997 Amazon was the biggest customer of that Ingram warehouse and their daily orders were processed in hours. They were also getting discounts comparable to B&N instead of paying non-chain bookstore prices. The playing field was level and already starting to tilt Amazon's way. B&N warehouses stocked 100,000 titles. Amazon "warehouse" was Ingram. And it cost them nothing to run it. if anything, the net 30 day terms paid Amazon to use Ingram courtesy of the float.
All this was knowable if the author had bothered to actually leave the office and research the matter.
But everybody assumed that B&N money would bury two year old Amazon.
In three more years, they would instead by fretting over Amazon's ascendance.
And that is a textbook case of "ironic".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/...F3Q?li=BBnb7Kz
Seriously, B&N did most everything necessary to succeed.
They just did it very very poorly. And in the most expensive way possible.
Anybody around here can list their missteps by the dozen.
Contrary to today's whiny memes, it wasn't "AMAZON'S DEEP POCKETS" that sunk B&N. It was their own incompetence and arrogance.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1509...rnes-and-noble
Hindsight simply adds to the humor.
