Looking to the Past to Create the Future

I walk by a shuttered Borders everyday on the way to work. It always gets me thinking, “What’s next?” An institution, 40 years standing, now gone, in an instant.

A TIME article  discusses five reasons Borders failed: late entry to the web, slow adoption and minimal focus on eBooks, too much focus on music CDs, and then broader business issues such as having too large a footprint and too much debt.

Amazon and B&N were busy creating Kindles and NOOKS and investing in marketing to get them on the top of consumers’ minds. They were re-inventing, respecting change.

Borders lost focus of what consumers really valued: easy and affordable access to content.

The stores were “extras” that simply did not provide enough value to substantiate the trip and the higher retail prices. Reading itself no longer was a gathering experience. Coffee shops, like Starbucks, were quickly filling that void.

Who would of thought a major bookstore chain could have been ushered into bankruptcy by a $99 device and a WiFi connection?

So my question is, “What’s next?” As with any disruptive technology people tend to assume that’s it—there’s no more room for innovation.

So this brings me to today, where I think of last weeks launch of AJ Mobile. Our charter for these featured solutions is to help companies and organizations communicate with their audiences via mobile channels. Currently we are focusing on immediate needs: How do we transition current means of communication to mobile with the same content and framework? A meeting schedule becomes a digital meeting schedule. A communications portal becomes a platform solution delivered via an app. These are great solutions that will serve immediate needs.

So where does Borders fit in? It propels me to ask, “Why?” and “What can be?” not just “How?” And in doing so in tandem with developing our current solutions think of novel ways for communication outside of today’s current constructs. Thank you, Borders for teaching me to never stop inventing.