Previously known as one of the highly successful book retailers in America, Borders Books and Music store has filed for bankruptcy.
The company cited several reasons for their filing, they indicated that hundreds of their stores were simply not profitable, citing increased competition from the growing popularity of electronic books (iPad) and digital music as a major contributing factor.
Borders will be closing around 200 of its stores across the nation.
It won’t be long before a book becomes an ancient object!
We’ve seen this before with Blockbuster Video and now with Borders, and you can bet we’ll continue to see this trend of more traditional retail products unable to keep pace with the growing digital world. Netflix made Blockbuster obsolete almost overnight.
The future is going to be difficult for companies that are in the line of fire of the digital revolution. Their choices are limited.
While many of these companies may be able to see these changes coming, there’s very few that have the ability to change their infrastructure in time to do anything about it. In fact, it’s almost more profitable for those companies to concentrate on making their existing product better, rather than expending the resources necessary to compete with their digital/electronic counterparts. But they can fight the battle as long as they want, they’ll eventually lose the war.
Which company, which industry will be next to get hit by digital and technological revolution? Is it newspapers? We’re not that far away from coffee and the iPad news publication in the morning…In fact, while we talk about the coming of the digital revolution, in many ways, isn’t it already here?
Did you manage to catch who won Jeopardy! Last night? His name was Watson, and he’s a machine, literally.
