Technical people with decimated incomes were forced to shop at the cheapest places for life’s basic necessities. Many times this meant they bought on-line, no longer visiting the shopping mall or the indie book store. I used to live not far from one of the best indie geek book stores out there. It had everything about computers and software. The parking lot was always packed. It was named “Books & Bytes.” I think I still have one of the heavy cloth book shopping bags from the place. When “right sizing” hit, it died. The only people coming in were teenagers with no money to spend who used the place like a research library. Borders fell when mall traffic both fell and switched to “only what is on the list.”
Barnes & Noble did take both on-line sales and, eventually, ebooks, seriously. They simply treated their IT people as a necessary evil, the cost of which should be continually cut. They too heard the siren song of “right sizing” falling victim to “Grade 8 Bolt Syndrome.”
Of course the ultimate chorus in the “right sizing” siren song leading to death and destruction was “out sourcing” which was quickly followed by a resounding rendition of “off-shoring.” The latter song further decimated the pool of disposable income needed by all of the brick and mortar retailers.
When Barnes & Noble turned to “out sourcing” they contracted corporate AIDS. They had unprotected business intercourse with Microsoft which is a death sentence for all. Even financial advisors have finally realized this.
During Steve Ballmer’s tenure, MSFT bought 149 companies, and 121 of them have vaporized into the ether. No wonder Ballmer is bald.
Barnes & Noble out sourced their Web presence and Nook development to Microsoft around the same time Microsoft was desperately working on Zune. Yes, the Zune didn’t ship until 2006, and it was yet another colossal flop, but new products required many years of development back then.
The Barnes & Noble Web site worked about as well as every other Microsoft product, which is to say, barely, on a good day. If you weren’t using the latest Internet Explorer, you were basically locked out. Most everybody by then was using either Firefox or Opera due to the rampant security holes in IE. As an aside, IE has been officially taken to the woods and shot with Windows 10. Microsoft Edge has supposedly been coded from scratch in a white room operation where the developers never had access to any of the source or documentation.
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