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Bloodletting Retail
December 26, 2007
Phlebotomy, or if you prefer the more common term, bloodletting, was a treatment of preference for a wide range of afflictions, used by physicians from antiquity all the way through the late 19th century.
Of course, we now scratch our modern heads and wonder how that ever could have been, but hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe it was like sloppy police work that jails someone, anyone, just to have a conviction. With diseases, they didn’t know what caused the problem, so what the heck, bleed ‘em until a better cure comes along that is too obvious to ignore.
Or maybe it’s like CE retail merchandising. Do as we’ve always done; open a store, put the product on the shelf and wait for someone to buy it again, at least until something better comes along.
However there are signs that technology retailing is changing, one would hope for the better, driven by the realization that the old ways are the reason sales are limited. For example, Amazon’s sale of DRM-free MP3 music, which can easily be imported into iTunes, the dominant music software, either as an MP3 file or a proprietary iTunes AAC file. A few short months ago that would have been unthinkable. And now who knows — maybe we will soon see all barriers to digital music (and video) distribution fall away. If that happens, how much more music and video might be sold and along with it more CE hardware to play that content?
Well, that’s one view, with others seeing end-of-life-as-we-know-it Armageddon. All are in agreement that we are opening the flood gates, the only question being: to what? Opponents see a complete loss of control over intellectual property rights while proponents counter it is a chance to reach new sales heights for both content and equipment once the (un)natural barriers to both have been removed.
One of them a Phlebotomist, the other a new-age physician.
Bill Matthies is the president of Coyote Insight (www.coyoteinsight.com) and can be reached at (714) 726-2901 or wmatthies@coyoteinsight.com. Visit the Coyote Blog.
Posted by Bill Matthies on December 26, 2007 | Comments (2)
