When the NYT said today that "Amazon accelerates its move to digital", I did a doubletake. Amazon, indie-book seller killer, digital poster child, is "accelerating" a move "to digital"? Isn't that a bit redundant?
First the web showed the music industry that they weren't actually in the "music business", they were in the manufacturing business: pressing CD's and distributing them/selling them to retailers WAS the business model. Then came Napster. BitTorrent. iTunes. Waaa waaaaah.
And now, with iTunes displacing Walmart as the largest seller of music in America, Amazon is no longer a digital company - it's a digital front end on an enormously sophisticated pick, pack and ship facility. Great front end, wonderful purchase matching/preference agorithms, but at the end of the day, they move vast quantities of physical product. And that's a liability.
When "digital" companies are put at risk by the pace of change, that's wild. And so cool.
Apple - wow. Friction free sales, no inventory. Damn. Someone's going to write a lame business book on this. Assuming the LHC doesn't convert everyone to strangelets, will anyone read the crap book on a Kindle?
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