Archive for the ‘Markets’ Category
Why a Kindle monopoly is good for us
Farhad Manjoo at Slate thinks we should “Fear the Kindle” and suggests Amazon will hamstring publishing the way Apple did the music industry.
We can only hope.
New markets or categories are always created by one player. It’s a feature, not a bug.
One player MUST initially dominate the new category to carve the way and make sense of it to consumers. Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Miramax, and Threadless didn’t emerge as leaders so much by designing new products as they did by contextualizing new ideas. By creating understanding during times of change—in some kind of marketable form factor—they were rewarded by patronage.
Where was non-professional photography before Kodak? Multiplex art-house films before Miramax? Or crowdsourced t-shirts before Threadless? Nowhere.
Each category-in-waiting, like every idea, needs an author to shape and sell it. Once they do, consumers can understand and buy it.
And like authorship, only one person can write the story. (How many of your favorite novels were written by committee?) That’s essential to your enjoyment, but it’s also essential to the author.
Founders, like writers, must wrestle with ambiguous ideas and make sense of them, trimming unnecessary features while retaining the core. In the process, they reveal to themselves the hidden themes that make the concept valuable. It’s that clarity that helps them position their product to solve our problem.
When Bill Gates realized he could syndicate his OS, he was able to articulate his vision for “a computer on every desk in every home” and the personal computing era bloomed. In turn, WE made Microsoft a monopoly as thanks for ushering-in the digital age.
When Harvey Weinstein tinkered with foreign-film aesthetics by adding Hollywood casting and multiplex distribution, he created the modern indie and trumped Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute who had been laboring on the idea for years. As a result, Miramax defined—and dominated—film during the 90s and ushered in an era of storytelling so skilled that it was dubbed the “new realism.”
When Steve Jobs linked the player, the store, and the jukebox, he joined the ranks of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke by demonstrating the future and articulating something we all sensed but couldn’t define. As a result, iPod’s musical ecosystem and Apple were rewarded with a monopoly.
(Hint: monopolies, like Barack Obama, are voted into power to make change when the presiding regime no longer works.)
So when Manjoo quotes Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as saying “Everyone is worried that Amazon will end up becoming to books what Apple is to music,” hum a silent prayer this comes true. Traditional publishing is broken. Digital publishing is a mess. We should be so lucky to have someone fix it.
The Kindle + store + wireless is preceded by Sony’s Reader by years and several other “well positioned” players. What happened? Their story made no sense. They revealed no purpose. They generated no clarity. (They’re the Jonathan Franzen of their category: byzantine and commercially unviable.)
If Amazon DOES come to dominate the market, it will be because Bezos’ unlocked the mystery of digital publishing and penned a story we could all understand (and threw in one-click convenience!)
Fear the reaper. Fear another Franzen novel. But not the Kindle.
