December 8th, 2014
The December 4th announcement of Microsoft’s retreat from Barnes & Noble is well documented. Barnes & Noble demonstrated how to turn $300 million into $125 million (OK, less than half). The company’s shares had a brief dip but then recovered.
September 23rd, 2014
At the end of 2012 I published a post called “Read & Watch the Future of Publishing at the New York Times.” That post considered John Branch’s award-winning “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” The New York Times continues to innovate, this time in the travel section. The short title is “Norway the Slow Way.”
September 18th, 2014
I last covered the topic “What Can the Music Business Teach the Book Business?” in a November, 2011 blog post. Today, in response to a fascinating blog entry on Brian O’Leary’s site I found myself revisiting the issue, leading to a comment I posted there.
September 18th, 2014
I’m thinking about two very different products each apparently well on the road to oblivion. Here’s a graph (roughly) illustrating the decline in the use of traveller’s cheques (aka “travelers checks” and several other spellings). There was tremendous growth through the mid-1990s. The drop-off is severe. Wikipedia details that “travelers cheques are no longer widely accepted…
August 5th, 2014
How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling is a thought-provoking interview with Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale online at the Harvard Business Review. Marc Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape. Jim Barksdale is a veteran of IBM, FedEx and AT&T Wireless “brought on a few months after Netscape’s founding to provide adult supervision as its CEO.” Both are now…