Amazon, Facebook: Retailers Want IT Leaders That Don’t Lead
Written by Evan SchumanMarch 4th, 2009
Many major retailers have been criticized for being slow to adapt to industry—especially Web-based—changes. But it's not hard to see why when we see how the industry treats e-tail pioneers such as Amazon and Facebook. To be fair, both Amazon and Facebook got spanked for going too far in respectively testing copyright and privacy limits, and both firms likely merited it.
And both firms quickly retreated. The specifics here do not indicate a major inappropriate reaction, but the pattern is discomforting. For companies to lead the industry and stake out strong global positions--especially in a weak economy—requires bold action. That means being aggressive at times to see how far consumers and competitors will permit them to go.
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3 Comments | Read Amazon, Facebook: Retailers Want IT Leaders That Don’t Lead
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March 5th, 2009 at 9:54 am
When you make the statement “Consumers are not that dumb (actually, they are, but let’s not go there)” you should use “we” instead of “they”.
Unless you manage to live a self-sufficient lifestyle on a farm somewhere.
Just because we might be on the business side of retail in our professional lives doesn’t free us from our roles as consumers, too.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
That was a great article. I’m glad I read it.
I’d heard about the Kindle thing with Amazon, and although I had heard about the Facebook issue, I don’t use it.
Now that I have read this, I wish all consumers also had a bunch of lawyers at their disposal!
Consumers aren’t necessarily dumb, they just can’t devote the time to decipher what the army of lawyers have concocted. And even that would assume they were properly informed about it.
Argh!
March 6th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Facebook has other troubles too, if you’re thinking of using the site for creating business groups, which as I learned the hard way not to, or you should think twice about putting much time into.
Since they cannot monitor all their members actions personally, your actions are monitored by technology, and it’s not perfect. You can easily do something that triggers their system to deactivate your profile, which in turn leaves any groups you started open to be taken over by the next person that visits the group.
Yes, a competitor could take over your group.
This is not well known among business people yet, but if facebook ever expects to be a serious player with business, their system needs to be fixed.