This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:
Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook
Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.
But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?
Only this: There is no market for the product.
Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?
Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”
“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”
“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”
That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.
But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.
Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more
