http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/4/4692088/jeff-bezos-is-a-hit-washington-post-staff-excited-by-new-owner
The new owner of the Washington Post met the staff today. It sounds like things went well – he kicked them in the butt but also gave confidence that he knows what to do.
Jeff Bezos has made Amazon into a powerhouse, and a lot of the reason why brick and mortar newspaper advertising is drying up. His company has the Kindle eReader and it’s pretty clear he sees that as the future of news delivery. I found this story reading Flipbook on an iPad – it’s a much more appealing way to read news than scanning drudge for yet more depressing headlines.
Flipboard allows me to “mute” annoyingly biased unuseful publications. The latest version is learning my tastes. I can read TheBlaze there. I like pictures.
His remark that hit a home run (that applies to radio just as much) is you have to stay young – if you decide to just grow old with your customers, you end up becoming Woolworth’s and fade away as your customers die off.
Flipbook is ok. I prefer RSS readers that download the full articles to in the background so that they are cached on my machine. There are sites such as http://fulltextrssfeed.com/ that are invaluable and may augment the Flipbook experience as well.
Here’s a photo of my my Flipbook 😉 http://thumbs2.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/mUQm_d4VQJNJsuBMes53W2A.jpg
I can’t wait for him to lose money on this. If you spend a 250 million dollars (or more) on a print newspaper in 2013 you still have invested poorly.
I think he views it as a cost effective way to lobby for your tax money.
Or forcing all online retailers to charge sales tax
He is moving to a model that will allow a local retailer to deliver it to you same day or for you to be able to pick it up at a local retailer immediately and not pay a shipping charge…. leveraging his inventory management, distribution, and payment processing.
One of the things I can kind of see at the Food Wholesaler I was working for (and may resume) is they’re living in a 50 year old business model. Once a month, you publish prices for your products, then you have fixed routes with scheduled deliveries on certain days. It’s very rigid, neither accommodating variations in supply and demand or reacting to unexpected change.
They’re experimenting with retail wholesale stores where a restaurant owner can drive to a store and shop for large quantities in a retail store, but that’s a hugely inefficient distribution system – there is a limit how far someone is going to drive their truck to save money.
That is a “mainframe” model of the world. The new model says to find the product currently near the retail buyer and allow the retail buyer to either pick it up of have it delivered same day.
Later, the item will be replenished by Amazon to the retailer, and the retailer will get a fee for the “float” and/or delivery charges – all for an item that was already sold to someone else, so the retailer does not look at it as competition but rather as a new market segment.
Retailer even gets mushy – to do same day Amazon delivery doesn’t require you to rent space in a mall or even a quality strip mall
I learned the hard way a year ago that Dial A Mattress failed using this business model. I had used them previously with two guys showing up with a mattress from the back of an unlabeled van… I placed an order when I moved here only to be told “oh we’ll place an order with the factory and you’ll get it in a few weeks. WTF? I need it tonight to have something to sleep on….