commbasics

Right now, I think Amazon and Google have become the best friends of retail world, including local business. I’m not sure Costco can survive. If I were a stock holder, I’d be calling my broker.  I made a significant decision recently to let my Costco membership expire and give my business to Amazon and a lot of it has to do with how both have marketed themselves to me.  i think I might be on the cutting edge on this “trend” but I think it’s going to cause trouble for Costco down the road.  I have shopped at Costco since 1987.  Average trip was around $300 and I went twice a month.  I still shopped at local brick-and-mortars when Costco didn’t have what I needed, but bulk items bought there made more sense.   I boycotted Amazon for a time because of their stance and active lobbying against state sales tax in California , but when they gave up their tactics that actually hurt small, local business I decided to give their Amazon Prime service a try....

The vision of the market most companies have is akin to a many walking toward a cliff holding a full-length mirror in front of them. Everything looks great until they run out of land. I got some interesting feedback on my post regarding UBM’s #EELive event both negative and positive reactions.  I said I would have more to say on this and here it is. It’s not UBM’s fault if your industry conference goes bad.  It’s yours. UBM fought the good fight to deliver to B2B industry what it needed, which was an independent source of news and analysis for many years.  About five years ago, it decided to give their customers what they demanded, which was a place to repeat the same marketing collateral they send out to their customers, both on line and in person.  UBM found this a much more profitable business as they saw their marketing services eclipse editorial in revenue.  Today, editorial brings in about 7 percent of the total revenue and trade shows generate a w...

I went to the latest incarnation of the Embedded Systems Conference, now #EELive. This was, at one time my favorite trade show because of its diversity. This reboot, the third in five years, was more diverse, but that seems to be working against it now. It has seven distinct tracks : embedded systems, internet of things, FPGA, security, hardware startups, Android development and C++ development. None of it seemingly attracting the core audience or engineers, however, because there were not many people there. At least not as many as there use to be. I went to the latest incarnation of the Embedded Systems Conference , now #EELive. This was, at one time my favorite trade show because of its diversity.  This reboot, the third in five years, was more diverse, but that seems to be working against it now. It has seven distinct tracks : embedded systems, internet of things, FPGA , security, hardware startups, Android development and C++ development.  None of it seemingly a...