How Amazon’s Success Destroys Itself?

Earlier, Serdar linked to an excellent article by Baldur Bjarnson (current winner of ‘The Most Viking Name Ever’ six years running) and his fascinating analysis of Amazon’s situation and what they (or someone else) should do.

Of course I say “read the article” but part of why you come here is hard-hitting analysis, deep insight, and guys making fun of people’s names.

His essential argument is that Amazon has a surprisingly weak position, margin issues, technical issues, and strengths with vulnerabilities.  The end result could be a market like the ever-dismalifying comics market in his opinion.  His arguments are pretty solid.

However his most fascinating argument is that Amazon’s integration could destroy it.  As bookstores disappear and less publications are seen, Amazon could end up catering to a specialist audience.  It’s sad to say, but people already aren’t reading enough books anyway (in my opinion), and I can see a case where e-Books end up having issues finding audience due to lack of awareness and competition that never existed before.

I’ve chewed over this idea as it seems to fit some other models – extraction models.  Amazon runs on pretty tight margins (if not “no margins” in some ways).  This could be seen like any extraction industry, or even as a flashback to the “getting eyeballs” from the pre dot-bomb day, neither of which are exactly encouraging metaphors.  There’s already plenty of competition in the form of open formats or even that clunky but beloved format PDF.

So after reading this article, here I sit, teetering on the abyss, and wondering if Amazon actually will turned out to have messed up.  Having been through many Comic Meltdowns, the metaphor sits in my mind uncomfortably – weird variants, cool promotions, hopeful indies, price arguments, and even a narrow channel (Diamond).

Steven Savage

 

How Cable Companies Can Adapt . . . Maybe

So I killed my cable.  Dead.  Gone.  No more.  Hulu, Netflix, and gizmos for me, thanks very much, that’s how I’ll get my video.

So now, based on my experience that cable is unnecessary (and financially unsound) for most households, what can cable companies do to become something more modern and useful?  What does it mean for us?

(This, by the way, assumes said companies will embrace change.  Cable companies have ,at times, followed in the steps of others, but I can’t say they’ve actually been enthused or active dealing with change.  But one can hope.)

Read more

More Cuts At AOL

You can get the skinny here.  It’s 100 employees being laid off.

What’s most interesting are the cuts to super-popular AIM, which an insider says is basically support staff.  Surely that will be fixed, but my guess is AOL sees AIM as a cash cow and doesn’t plan to do anything new with it.

A good deal of AOL’s activities seems to be seeking to maximize the numbers in profit, so I don’t see any actual plan so much as calculations.  Not sure where this is going to end up.

TAKEAWAYS:

  • AOL is probably going to go for some radical rebranding soon.  OK further radical rebranding – they really aren’t “anything.”
  • AIM will probably survive, but it’ll be just a service that doesn’t really grow.
  • I wouldn’t send a resume to AOL.
  • Bonnie and I?  WAY wrong on AOL in the past.  Just apologizing.

Steven Savage