 |
 |
 |
|
If I'm so smart, how come I don't sell anything? Jakob Nielsen has posted a long, thoughtful and (to me) flattering response to all this from Glenn Fleishman, who incorrectly labels himself "Unsolicited Pundit." All thoughtful responses are most solicited, especially if they come from guys with sites like this. (Hey Glenn, what's with Wordsworth? Can they make their prices available to you?) Whoosh. When I made my living as a marketing consultant, I used to discourage potential clients who didn't buy my simple marketing logic:
I confess that when I put up my little report on Amazon vs. Wordsworth, it was an act of arson. I expected to spark a conversation with Dave. He and I had a phone conversation a few days ago that I was hoping to bring public in a way that would set some fires. Which I don't just see as destructive, by the way. The fire we call The Big Bang was pure creation. All fire is transformation. (Is it just coincidental that I bring this up on both the Feast of the Transfiguration and the 45th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing? Probably not.) Now the fire has spread from here to DaveNet, and to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, in a piece titled "Why Doc Searls doesn't sell anything." [To get technical about it, I don't sell any books. At least not through Wordsworth, my active partner in the matter.] A few words about Wordsworth. First, it appears they're more expensive than Amazon (they are for the Cluetrain book). That's kinda non-trivial. I don't mind paying more for a book at an independent bookstore — when I'm standing there, shopping already. I do mind paying more when I'm on the Web and there are a zillion other choices. Second, Wordsworth, like most of the other online bookstores, isn't doing anything too original. Frankly, they're knocking off Amazon. Not a bad thing, since Amazon has done much to define the online shopping experience. But they're doing less than Amazon. As is pretty much everybody else. Yes, they have an affiliate program, but it isn't automated. Much of it happens in email. Not bad from a conversational perspective, but not competitive, either. Third, I think it's imperative that we support independent booksellers. Look back over the last decade and ... jeez... these guys have been through a hell they don't deserve. That we don't deserve. I don't have the exact numbers, but I believe only about 20% of the adult American population bothered to buy one or more books last year. The overall book business hasn't grown much, yet the independent booksellers, the most civilizing influence on every community they grace, were clobbered first by mall chains like Dalton's, then by deep discounters like Crown, then by "big box" retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble, then by Amazon.com and all the other book stores that went on line as well. All in the last decade. And they're still here. Come on. Let's buy some of their books. Or at least their steamed coffees. And if you're in the Boston area, please buy your books at Wordsworth. They're a great store and deserve your support. If they can't compete on the Web, so what. Amazon can't compete on the street in Cambridge, either. Here's an idea (which I've been doing for the past several months): print out your Amazon shopping cart and use it as a shopping list when you go to your independent bookstore. I'll bet two things will happen:
Several years ago, the great hacker, writer and entrepreneur Jamie Zawinski told me over lunch that exactly one e-commerce company was doing it right on the Web, and that was Amazon. I think that's less true today than it was back then — but not much. Yesterday I had an exemplary experience buying speakers through HiFi.com, the people who make those nice little Cambridge jobs (which I always thought were highly inventive and a great value for the money). In fact, the experience was better than Amazon's in one respect: HiFi.com just sells hi-fi gear. They aren't trying to be Wal-Mart. Speaking of which, I want to give Jeff Bezos and Amazon their due as pioneers. IMHO, they have done more original work in e-commerce than any other company out there, by an enormous margin. It's a damn shame that they paid more respect to fear and lawyers than to the markets they helped make. But maybe we should thank them for that, too. IBM holding a zillion patents and pushing around oppponents isn't news. Amazon suing Barnes & Noble over the 1-Click patent was huge. Jeff was our friend. But when he sued Barnes & Noble, he went over to the Dark Side. But hey, it's still early. And I have faith The Force will win. The Force is markets, and Markets R Us. We're the 20 million music lovers (we're customers, dammit!) who used Napster to get from each other what we couldn't get from commercial radio. I want to thank Dave for sharing that insight on the phone the other day. It was brilliant. He's so right! Napster is radio! It's about sharing record collections the way the great radio stations of yesterdecade used to do, and today's robotic commercial radio can't remember and can no longer even begin to conceive. It's the way the market routes around a long-dead intermediary. It's finally starting to get clear: if you think business is just about moving goods, you're gonna lose. If you still think consumers are gullets, that markets are buckets at the ends of conveyor belts, and that everything you can sell is nothing more than "content," you aren't going to survive, because you won't be in the conversation. The conversation is the market, and the conversation will prevail. That's why there's hope for Jeff Bezos. He is on the record favoring both markets-as-conversations, and the need for patent reform. He has committed to working with lawmakers to change things. Since he made that commitment a few months ago, I'd like to know how that's going. If anybody can clue us in, please do. For those of you who are new to the drill, if you want to discuss all this, click on the cow skull at the bottom of today's log and you should find yourself on a discussion page. I think you may have to register. I should know, but I don't. (Forgive me, after several months at this, I'm still learning.) What happens when you combine this with EGR? Heard this morning from Jason Fried of 37 Signals, who thanked me for pointing to Enormicom, and pointing all of us to Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals weblog. Of course, it's equally tasteful and terrific. I love the idea of using a vertical bar — | — in the title. Very nice way of indicating where the page stands in the site's directory. Their top item tells about how the Colorado Department of Transportation moved an exit to the other side of a highway in Boulder, where, coicidentally, two of our four Cluetrain co-authors abide. One of them runs EGR, which features (or at least used to feature... kinda hard to tell) "all noise, all the time." Perhaps it's implicated in that highway thing. Hmm. From within a few minutes after Amazon.com began offering its affiliate program, I was selling books from my site.
Meanwhile, Amazon continues to sell for me, mostly from occasional links out of here (which I throw in every once in a while, to see what happens). Not sure what to make of it. Meanwhile, more than one developer has told me that the Amazon patent has had the effect of stifling software development in the conceptual viscinity of the affiliate program ("1-Click") patent. That patent, it seems, scares money away. The VCs don't want the risk, and there are too many other tempting investments. If anybody has additional thoughts or facts to communicate on this matter, I'm interested. (There's a terrific response from Dave already. How about the rest of ya'll?) There are responses to this message:
|
