Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Management - Essay Example Innovation and its implementation is what made Barnes & Noble and Amazon more successful. Before e-readers were introduced to the market, everyone was competing on rather equal terms: both Barnes & Noble and Borders Books were selling their products in own superstores, so the major source of income was always coming from physical in-store sales. The process got somewhat changed when Amazon developed as an online book store. First of all, it became a strong competitor because offered people an alternative to going to a superstore – online shopping for books. Secondly, it gave such companies as Barnes & Noble and Borders Books to enter the online marketplace as well. However, the progress didn’t stop at that stage. Technologies gave publishers such e-book reading applications as Kindle of Amazon and the Nook of Barnes & Noble. That was the point when Borders Books got behind. Case Analysis: the Publishing Market Thought the physical book sales of Barnes & Noble were going down, the company managed to raise them by 80 percent compared to the last year, with the help of the developed by them e-book reader – the Nook. ... Retail numbers, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum (2011) might be as much as two times above the presented figures because of the industry wholesale discounts. This means that the e-book industry is still growing and developing. Furthermore, more and more companies are working on the development of their own e-book readers with the purpose of taking some share of this market. However, Apple's iPad has made it nearly impossible for some organizations: Plastic Logic Que, a businees-oriented device, Bookeen Orizon, the Skiff for reading magazines and newspapers (Neary 2011, 3)– these devices never got popular in the market due to the already existing competition from Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble the Nook. Key Problems of the Industry It can be seen that both, Borders Books and Barnes & Noble, have taken some steps to adjust to the new market conditions: both have some online presence. Nevertheless, both companies still heavi ly rely on physical sales in their stores. Borders Books has not even gone further than letting Amazon manage all of the company’s online sales - Borders Books failed to invest into entering the emerging at that time online book market (Neary 2011, 4). This may have been caused by an assumption that, according to Henderson (1993, 248), many companies fail to adequately respond to market innovations because of the security they had enjoyed for many years’ stable presence in the market. Such companies then get used to continuous change process, if any, and do not make any attempts to introduce some radical changes, even if such are crucial for survival (Chandy, Prabhu, and Antia 2003, 1). So Borders Books, having felt well in