Matthew Yglesias has a short little article about how J.C. Penny is killing wifi in their stores, one of the things Ron Johnson put in place during his very short tenure:
I can think of no better example of how Ron Johnson destroyed J.C. Penney than the company’s slightly ridiculous plan to offer free Wi-Fi in all its stores. That this was a bad idea is not the reason the store’s been struggling. But the fact that Johnson couldn’t see that this simply isn’t something his customers would have any real desire to take advantage of spoke volumes about the strategic errors happening in Penneyland.
I’m not sure this was such a stupid move by Johnson. Speaking to a guy at the American Marketing Association conference in New Orleans last week, he made the point that in many of these giant stores (he used to work at Target), the cell coverage is so bad that wifi is the only way to get coverage and potentially do something interesting with customers’ mobile phones in store. If we assume that mobile research will be an important part of buying in the future then it might turn out they’ll just have to go back and reinstall all that wifi anyway.
September 19, 2013 // This post is about: business, jc penny, Mobile, shopping, Slate, wifi
There’s lot of talk about the numbers from Black Friday. Twitter and Facebook didn’t fare well, mobile was up and iphone destroyed Android. Horace at Asymco asks the obvious question about the last stat: Why?
This I consider to be a paradox: Why is Android attracting late adopters (or at least late adopter behavior) when the market is still emergent? We’ve become accustomed to thinking that platforms that look similar are used in a similar fashion. But this is clearly not the case. The shopping data is only one proxy but there are others: developers and publishers have been reporting distinct differences in consumption on iOS vs. Android and, although anecdotal, the examples continue to pile up.
He’s not satisfied with the idea that android has a different demographic profile because of how many people own them now. So what could it be?
November 28, 2012 // This post is about: android, Mobile, UX
Interesting perspective from Fred Wilson on how Instagram is challenging the iPhone’s built in camera. His conclusion: “Clean, simple, networked, social, cross platform mobile apps will be the winning model in the mobile ecosystem and the OS vendors will not be able to maintain dominance with the default apps they ship with the OS.”
February 12, 2012 // This post is about: interesting, Mobile, networks
