The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
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…
June 18th, 2014
Several journalists took a small segue today in their coverage of the launch of the Amazon Fire Phone to note that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has been extinguished. Or nearly so. Based on IDC’s May report, the Kindle Fire has only 1.9% of worldwide tablet shipments, down 47% year-to-year.
June 1st, 2014
Indigo Books and Music reported its 4th quarter and annual sales last week. A few of the news stories reached for an alarmist tone. Canada’s Financial Post headlined its account with “Indigo annual revenue falls for third consecutive year.” Publishers Weekly went for the more startling “Indigo Has Big Fiscal 2014 Loss.”
May 19th, 2014
Here’s BBC’s version of tonight’s news story about Google’s proposed $1 billion acquisition of Twitch; you can find many more stories of equally pricey deals during the last few years. (Amazon ended up buying Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million). There’s no point in pontificating about a new Internet bubble. The maneuvering of high…