I'm still dumbfounded about the iFlowReader tantrum in blaming Apple for the failure to profit on ebook sales.
It's hard to understand the audacity of complaining about your own, let alone any, failed venture in such a volatile, competitive market when that market maintains the intense and immediate interest of players like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Apple, and so on.
Companies like these don't generally broadcast their intentions about these things, but even the casual observer doesn't really have to read between the lines. The role of the traditional agent and middleman isn't necessarily essential any more.
Seth Godin recently wrote,
"...we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades."Don't you think Amazon has been preparing for this for a while? Apple knows it too, and has its own model. "Razors" are big business.
The smartest players have longer views than the iFlowReaders ninnies of the world who are attempting to play in a big game with bigger players. They have to be prepared for the potentiality of getting smashed around a little.
To establish a business on misplaced and ill-informed hope, and then to gnash teeth and cast blame at others for failure seems eerily familiar. As if we've seen this strategy at play over the last several years elsewhere. Could we not maybe borrow the term "audacity of hope" to reference this behavior too? It has that foul smell of false hope paired with the audacity of a spoilt child - a sure-fire formula for failure. Someone needs to change a diaper.
