Barnes & Noble Won't Give Up On the Nook 132
jfruh writes "Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader line has largerly been regarded as a botched attempt to compete with the Kindle, whose failure has contributed to the bookseller's financial woes. Well, despite earlier statements that the company was abandoning it as a hardware platform, now the B&N CEO insists that the company is committed to the product line and the new Nooks are in development."
The Nook is a good example (Score:5, Insightful)
of a company proactively doing the right thing, embracing technology at the risk of cannibalizing its own products by redefining their business as something larger than selling books. They implemented the technology the right way, or at least have received awards and top scores from magazines such as Consumer Reports, set a reasonable price (easily within the budget of a large proportion of existing customers), and marketed it aggressively - the Nook is front and center in many of the B&N stores I go to.
And it still hasn't worked out for them.
So the next time you hear some MBA smarties belittling CEOs of flailing companies for not having the vision to go beyond what made them successful in the past, remember the Nook. It's not as easy as these pundits make it sound.
B&N (Score:4, Insightful)
B&N has been Ballmer'd