Nook Failure, Lack of Foot Traffic Could Spell Doom For Barnes & Noble

tripleevenfall sends in a story at Yahoo Finance forecasting the end of Barnes & Noble. Quoting: "The last nationwide book retailer may be writing its final chapter. Barnes & Noble's latest quarterly results show a 7.4% drop in revenues and a $122 million loss for the fourth-quarter of its fiscal year. B&N's disastrous focus on making Nook e-Readers is weighing heavily on the chain's operations. A 17% drop in Nook revenues and stunning $475 million loss for the device division in 2013 are hobbling the company's ability to keep its stores afloat. B&N appears to be cannibalizing itself with branded tablets and cross-platform e-reader applications, which render the stores increasingly irrelevant."

Comments

Re:Two words

[roman_mir]

magnanimous? Are you for real?

The guy was an absolutely ruthless businessman, he would set up competitive auctions between shipping companies (which was the point of why he bought land for his refinery operations close to rail road and with access to water ways, so he could pit rail and boat shipping companies against each other). He hired people and trained them personally in the art of selling his product at the best price (for him). He set part of his profits aside to self-ensure against fires and thefts, etc., he cut entire parts of 'normal' (for the time) business procedures out and reimplemented them himself, he was vertically integrating at every business opportunity. He called the bluff of his first business partner and bid on the entire business against him (he was about 26 at the time, having worked since age of 16, from nothing he already managed to save a considerable small fortune, and threw together about 80K and bought the entire business), that was due to his partner wanting to get out, as the partner didn't realise how profitable the business can be. You can say he was Larry Ellison of the day, except he was much better at it, would you say that Larry Ellison is 'magnanimous' today?

In any case, throwing words like that around shows complete lack of understanding of how business operates, why decisions are made and what it means to be most productive and thus most profitable.

Rockefeller wasn't "magnanimous" when it concerned his business. He was charitable otherwise, but never in business.

However saying that the company would 'abuse' it's position sometime down the road and so it must be broken apart, that's ridiculous. Here we have a company that is excellent at providing best quality kerosene (and later other oil byproducts) at the lowest prices consistently by investing in better and more efficient processes and technologies all the time, but because LATER it could abuse its dominant role of the most efficient oil refiner and deliverer it should be broken up? That's cutting your nose to spite your face, it immediately retarded the development in the industry that put competitive downward pressure on prices and prices have not been lower since, they have only gone up.

However in an actual free market, there is no unshakable dominant position for ANY business if a government is not involved. It takes a government to solidify and cement status of a business as a monopoly. AT&T is one perfect case of such government created monopoly, which was created by government destroyed 3000 private competitors, which for many decades provided uncompetitive, unimaginative product line that nobody was allowed to compete against and once that was over the competition exploded and number of products expanded dramatically (from different types of phones to answering machines, to different, better service quality, to lower prices, to mobile devices, etc.)