7 ms·

Barnes and Noble Laid Off Its Nook Hardware Engineering Staff

46 points by rajbala 13y ago

AnotherDesigner 13y ago
I really don't trust Amazon having a monopoly on any market especially one I care about as much as books. While they still have competition, things seem to be going in their favor. Even more so after the justice department handed them control over the market again when they complained about Apple. Amazon is taking the Walmart strategy: push your competitors out with unsustainable pricing and then take over the market and charge whatever you want when they're all gone.
- Nicholas_C 13y ago
  >and charge whatever you want when they're all gone. Where does Walmart do this? I've never been to a Walmart where pricing was out of line. Moreover, predatory pricing is litigious at best and illegal at worst.
  - Fasebook 13y ago
    How would you even know what predatory pricing is.
    - noarchy 13y ago
      I suspect that it is "predatory" if it puts you out of business. It becomes illegal if you can convince a legislature to intervene (witness what happened in France, to Amazon[1]). Consumers don't tend to complain about lower prices. 1: http://www.france24.com/en/20140109-french-senators-pass-anti-amazon-law-protect-small-retailers/ http://www.france24.com/en/20140109-french-senators-pass-ant...
  - AnotherDesigner 13y ago
    A good example of this behavior recently has been Walmarts big push on groceries. I saw it first hand when they did it in a small community I lived in. I also worked at Walmart as one of my first jobs so I had an inside look at things including their anti-union programs and pricing strategies. Google "Walmart predatory pricing", it's a well-documented issue.
shmerl 13y ago
That was expected, once MS bribed them to stop the failure with their patent lawsuit.
brianbreslin 13y ago
I wonder if they could still succeed going pure software route. Would the margins on the ebooks make sense? I.e. make bundling deals so nook is on every tablet non-amazon that is shipped by default?
jkw 13y ago
A bit misleading when the title states "fired" and the first sentence of the article states "laid off"
cglace 13y ago
I always wondered why B&N didn't spin the nook hardware division off and focus on providing the content. Either way this sucks. I own a nook simple touch and love it. Hope they still keep their apps for other devices around.
noarchy 13y ago
I bought a Nook Color in early 2011 during a trip to the States (I live in Canada). It was the first Android device on which I did any sort of mobile dev or hacking. My first experiences with custom roms, in fact, was on my Nook Color. Unfortunately, the Nook lineup couldn't compete with what was rapidly emerging onto the market. It didn't take long for my Nook Color to start collecting dust once the Nexus 7 (still my tablet of choice, even though I own larger ones) became available.
placeybordeaux 13y ago
>Update: After posting this, Barnes & Noble told us that it did not eliminate its entire hardware department, but it declined to provide specifics.
pittsburgh 13y ago
I work for Nook as a Rails developer in Palo Alto. I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, blah blah blah, but I just wanted to post a quick comment saying that this news should NOT be interpreted as Nook going out of business. In fact, we're actively hiring devs here in Palo Alto and also in New York: http://www.nook.com/careers/locations http://www.nook.com/careers/locations I really wish I could provide details, but I'll just say that I would be extremely surprised if Nook wasn't around and doing well in five years. My coworkers and I really enjoy working here, and none of us worry about job security.
ForHackernews 13y ago
Oh crap. I like my Nook.
- mox1 13y ago
  Aye, I love my Nook HD+. Works great with Cyanogenmod. Too bad they crippled the software so much in its default configuration (in the beginning anyway, better today...too late). Put vanilla Android on there with a high quality e-reader app (and maybe a Nook Book Store), sell the HD+ for < $175 and they would have had a lot more success in my opinion.
  - MrZongle2 13y ago
    And if you're like me, with an older & slower Nook Color, Cyanogenmod 7 works pretty well. I tried 10, but it seemed rather sluggish.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    Ironically, the Nook for Android and Nook Video apps don't work on Cyanogenmod on the Nook HD/HD+ (not from the Play Store anyway, they do work if sideloaded). B&N should at least put in the effort to enable them on CM.
fidotron 13y ago
This is a shame. Their Android tablets were misguided, and never likely to be competitive, but the e-ink readers were the only things really competitive with the e-ink Kindles. I always thought if they had opened up the Android e-ink reader market more then they could have created a viable niche in reference applications, which are a surprisingly lucrative sector.
- falcolas 13y ago
  I always appreciated the nook tablets, not as readers, but as low-cost and fully featured android tablets.
  - fidotron 13y ago
    Yeah, I'm not knocking the actual products they got made, just that there's no way B&N had the resources to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and every other Android tablet manufacturer and make a decent margin. In picking their battles that wasn't a wise one to walk into.
- Fasebook 13y ago
  There is still a lot of room in the e-ink market. Everybody is just afraid to enter because of patent law.
- callahad 13y ago
  Have you checked out Kobo's e-ink readers? From a hardware perspective, I actually prefer the Kobo Aura to my own Kindle Paperwhite 2.
  - fidotron 13y ago
    I've not tried the latest ones, but the earlier ones just had a distinctly unfinished and rushed vibe to them. Kind of neat, but hacked together. It doesn't help that I'm in the Canadian market, and for a while Kobo existed simply as an e-reader to take advantage of the fact it was more easily available here than the Kindle, so I think we were exposed to rougher versions of the initial product than elsewhere.
VonGuard 13y ago
At this point, they should focus on the e-ink readers, and just offer a ton of free books for them. Beat Amazon at their own game by not making any money on the books.
- erichurkman 13y ago
  At this point, does B&N have the cash to burn like that on a loss-leader?
  - VonGuard 13y ago
    It's kinda a suicide mission. B&N is very nicely fucked anyway. Not much they can do but liquidate and compensate the shareholders sometime in the next 2 to 3 years.
mkaziz 13y ago
My (unsubstantiated) impression was that books on the Nook would always cost more than for the Kindle. I think I automatically associate Amazon with online, progressive and cheap, and B&N with clunky, b&m, and profit-focused. That's why I never even considered buying a Nook.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  The e-ink Nook readers are really nice. They're compatible with more formats than Kindle, and they can be rooted to do fun/interesting things.
- rcthompson 13y ago
  In what sense is Amazon less profit-focused than B&N?
  - doughj3 13y ago
    In the sense that Amazon doesn't make [much] profit: http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-still-doesnt-make-money-investors-dont-seem-care-1513368 http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-st...
  - lmkg 13y ago
    Amazon is focused on growth and market control. It is willing to take a smaller (short-term) profit in order to achieve those goals.
    - bpicolo 13y ago
      It's still profit focused, just for later.
- TheCowboy 13y ago
  My experience has been that prices are typically the same for ebooks on both platforms. But I get more flexibility from what devices I can read my books on via B&N, while I have to jump through hoops to get a Kindle book working in a non-Amazon reader. A few years ago I started working on an ebook price comparison site when I first bought my Nook, but I quit once I noticed there was very little price differentiation to make the effort worth it. My understanding was that ebook prices were being set by the publisher's. I think now overall there are more instances of price differentiation, but usually B&N still matches Amazon.
penguinlinux 13y ago
I love my Nook HD, it is a great Tablet, It has the google App Store and I can extend the storage. I think it is a great alternative to other tablets out there.
tedsanders 13y ago
I met a Nook engineer once, and she was convinced that the Nook was a better product than the Kindle. It's too bad that it never took off (as far as I can tell).
- josh2600 13y ago
  It turns out marketing is a thing and when you go into a brick & mortar store to buy a digital object people get confused. This is another example of technical superiority not being enough to win (see VHS vs Betamax as the classic example but there are a TON of these). I found this article by Amir Hirsch to be a good reference point for products in general, not just startups: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-startup-and-mit-startup.html http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-start...
  - mjn 13y ago
    > when you go into a brick & mortar store to buy a digital object people get confused For some part of the market I think this was actually a strength, though perhaps not a big enough strength, or not exploited well enough. We got my uncle (American, aged mid-80s) a Nook for Christmas 2012, in large part because we knew he could go to his local B&N to buy books and have them loaded onto it. That's worked pretty well: he basically buys books like he used to, except now they are more portable and he can zoom in to compensate for his poor eyesight, which is easier than reading paper books with a magnifying glass. With the Kindle we weren't sure whether he'd enjoy having to figure out how to shop online at Amazon. He rarely uses computers, and even more rarely uses the internet, so probably wouldn't buy books from a desktop connection. So he'd have to buy them online from within the Kindle itself with no local customer support available, which even to me seems like a confusing interface (it's not quite as bad as trying to navigate Google Play on a smartphone, but it's not great).
    - josh2600 13y ago
      Confusion is an opportunity to provide education and build consumer trust. If you're breaking intended behavior you need to pacify the confusion that results (this is a social capital creation opportunity). I do appreciate your point though and I think it's just another example of B&N having poor marketing.
chollida1 13y ago
Meta note... The HN title perfectly matches the articles title but the first line of the article actually says: "Barnes & Noble laid off its Nook hardware engineers, according to a source that tipped Business Insider." I only point this out because in North America, fired and laid off have two very different connotations.
- MBCook 13y ago
  I think in this situation it's pretty clear that it means "will no longer employ" without the with/without cause distinction.
- justin66 13y ago
  > I only point this out because in North America, fired and laid off have two very different connotations. ... to almost no one who does not work at a state unemployment office. I kid. More accurate snark would be to say "to everyone except the person just fired/laid off." A friend who was just laid off mentioned the way certain people feel the need to correct her when she mentions she was fired, and how hugely annoying that is. I experienced a similar thing years ago amongst my former coworkers after a large firing-I-mean-lay off. It all seems to have something to do with making everyone except the person just fired/laid off maintain a certain level of comfort, even though everyone understands that the effect of the thing is exactly the same. (back in the day it was probably all about whether the factory was going to call you back in eventually or not)
  - gutnor 13y ago
    Remember after getting laid off at my first job in London. I didn't know about the difference, my boss kept reminding me that I was not getting fired, but "terminated" As a foreigner, I only knew the lethal meaning of the term.
  - pavedwalden 13y ago
    To me, "laid off" means it was structural, whereas "fired" implies that the specific individual was deliberately gotten rid of. Also, I think "fired" carries a connotation of blame. You don't get laid off for calling your boss an asshole, you get fired.

46 points by rajbala 13y ago

I really don't trust Amazon having a monopoly on any market especially one I care about as much as books. While they still have competition, things seem to be going in their favor. Even more so after the justice department handed them control over the market again when they complained about Apple. Amazon is taking the Walmart strategy: push your competitors out with unsustainable pricing and then take over the market and charge whatever you want when they're all gone.

Nicholas_C 13y ago
>and charge whatever you want when they're all gone. Where does Walmart do this? I've never been to a Walmart where pricing was out of line. Moreover, predatory pricing is litigious at best and illegal at worst.
- Fasebook 13y ago
  How would you even know what predatory pricing is.
  - noarchy 13y ago
    I suspect that it is "predatory" if it puts you out of business. It becomes illegal if you can convince a legislature to intervene (witness what happened in France, to Amazon[1]). Consumers don't tend to complain about lower prices. 1: http://www.france24.com/en/20140109-french-senators-pass-anti-amazon-law-protect-small-retailers/ http://www.france24.com/en/20140109-french-senators-pass-ant...
- AnotherDesigner 13y ago
  A good example of this behavior recently has been Walmarts big push on groceries. I saw it first hand when they did it in a small community I lived in. I also worked at Walmart as one of my first jobs so I had an inside look at things including their anti-union programs and pricing strategies. Google "Walmart predatory pricing", it's a well-documented issue.

shmerl 13y ago

That was expected, once MS bribed them to stop the failure with their patent lawsuit.

brianbreslin 13y ago

I wonder if they could still succeed going pure software route. Would the margins on the ebooks make sense? I.e. make bundling deals so nook is on every tablet non-amazon that is shipped by default?

jkw 13y ago

A bit misleading when the title states "fired" and the first sentence of the article states "laid off"

cglace 13y ago

I always wondered why B&N didn't spin the nook hardware division off and focus on providing the content. Either way this sucks. I own a nook simple touch and love it. Hope they still keep their apps for other devices around.

noarchy 13y ago

I bought a Nook Color in early 2011 during a trip to the States (I live in Canada). It was the first Android device on which I did any sort of mobile dev or hacking. My first experiences with custom roms, in fact, was on my Nook Color. Unfortunately, the Nook lineup couldn't compete with what was rapidly emerging onto the market. It didn't take long for my Nook Color to start collecting dust once the Nexus 7 (still my tablet of choice, even though I own larger ones) became available.

placeybordeaux 13y ago

>Update: After posting this, Barnes & Noble told us that it did not eliminate its entire hardware department, but it declined to provide specifics.

pittsburgh 13y ago

I work for Nook as a Rails developer in Palo Alto. I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, blah blah blah, but I just wanted to post a quick comment saying that this news should NOT be interpreted as Nook going out of business. In fact, we're actively hiring devs here in Palo Alto and also in New York: http://www.nook.com/careers/locations http://www.nook.com/careers/locations I really wish I could provide details, but I'll just say that I would be extremely surprised if Nook wasn't around and doing well in five years. My coworkers and I really enjoy working here, and none of us worry about job security.

ForHackernews 13y ago

Oh crap. I like my Nook.

mox1 13y ago
Aye, I love my Nook HD+. Works great with Cyanogenmod. Too bad they crippled the software so much in its default configuration (in the beginning anyway, better today...too late). Put vanilla Android on there with a high quality e-reader app (and maybe a Nook Book Store), sell the HD+ for < $175 and they would have had a lot more success in my opinion.
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  And if you're like me, with an older & slower Nook Color, Cyanogenmod 7 works pretty well. I tried 10, but it seemed rather sluggish.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  Ironically, the Nook for Android and Nook Video apps don't work on Cyanogenmod on the Nook HD/HD+ (not from the Play Store anyway, they do work if sideloaded). B&N should at least put in the effort to enable them on CM.

fidotron 13y ago

This is a shame. Their Android tablets were misguided, and never likely to be competitive, but the e-ink readers were the only things really competitive with the e-ink Kindles. I always thought if they had opened up the Android e-ink reader market more then they could have created a viable niche in reference applications, which are a surprisingly lucrative sector.

falcolas 13y ago
I always appreciated the nook tablets, not as readers, but as low-cost and fully featured android tablets.
- fidotron 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm not knocking the actual products they got made, just that there's no way B&N had the resources to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and every other Android tablet manufacturer and make a decent margin. In picking their battles that wasn't a wise one to walk into.
Fasebook 13y ago
There is still a lot of room in the e-ink market. Everybody is just afraid to enter because of patent law.
callahad 13y ago
Have you checked out Kobo's e-ink readers? From a hardware perspective, I actually prefer the Kobo Aura to my own Kindle Paperwhite 2.
- fidotron 13y ago
  I've not tried the latest ones, but the earlier ones just had a distinctly unfinished and rushed vibe to them. Kind of neat, but hacked together. It doesn't help that I'm in the Canadian market, and for a while Kobo existed simply as an e-reader to take advantage of the fact it was more easily available here than the Kindle, so I think we were exposed to rougher versions of the initial product than elsewhere.

VonGuard 13y ago

At this point, they should focus on the e-ink readers, and just offer a ton of free books for them. Beat Amazon at their own game by not making any money on the books.

erichurkman 13y ago
At this point, does B&N have the cash to burn like that on a loss-leader?
- VonGuard 13y ago
  It's kinda a suicide mission. B&N is very nicely fucked anyway. Not much they can do but liquidate and compensate the shareholders sometime in the next 2 to 3 years.

mkaziz 13y ago

My (unsubstantiated) impression was that books on the Nook would always cost more than for the Kindle. I think I automatically associate Amazon with online, progressive and cheap, and B&N with clunky, b&m, and profit-focused. That's why I never even considered buying a Nook.

ForHackernews 13y ago
The e-ink Nook readers are really nice. They're compatible with more formats than Kindle, and they can be rooted to do fun/interesting things.
rcthompson 13y ago
In what sense is Amazon less profit-focused than B&N?
- doughj3 13y ago
  In the sense that Amazon doesn't make [much] profit: http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-still-doesnt-make-money-investors-dont-seem-care-1513368 http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-st...
- lmkg 13y ago
  Amazon is focused on growth and market control. It is willing to take a smaller (short-term) profit in order to achieve those goals.
  - bpicolo 13y ago
    It's still profit focused, just for later.
TheCowboy 13y ago
My experience has been that prices are typically the same for ebooks on both platforms. But I get more flexibility from what devices I can read my books on via B&N, while I have to jump through hoops to get a Kindle book working in a non-Amazon reader. A few years ago I started working on an ebook price comparison site when I first bought my Nook, but I quit once I noticed there was very little price differentiation to make the effort worth it. My understanding was that ebook prices were being set by the publisher's. I think now overall there are more instances of price differentiation, but usually B&N still matches Amazon.

penguinlinux 13y ago

I love my Nook HD, it is a great Tablet, It has the google App Store and I can extend the storage. I think it is a great alternative to other tablets out there.

tedsanders 13y ago

I met a Nook engineer once, and she was convinced that the Nook was a better product than the Kindle. It's too bad that it never took off (as far as I can tell).

josh2600 13y ago
It turns out marketing is a thing and when you go into a brick & mortar store to buy a digital object people get confused. This is another example of technical superiority not being enough to win (see VHS vs Betamax as the classic example but there are a TON of these). I found this article by Amir Hirsch to be a good reference point for products in general, not just startups: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-startup-and-mit-startup.html http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-start...
- mjn 13y ago
  > when you go into a brick & mortar store to buy a digital object people get confused For some part of the market I think this was actually a strength, though perhaps not a big enough strength, or not exploited well enough. We got my uncle (American, aged mid-80s) a Nook for Christmas 2012, in large part because we knew he could go to his local B&N to buy books and have them loaded onto it. That's worked pretty well: he basically buys books like he used to, except now they are more portable and he can zoom in to compensate for his poor eyesight, which is easier than reading paper books with a magnifying glass. With the Kindle we weren't sure whether he'd enjoy having to figure out how to shop online at Amazon. He rarely uses computers, and even more rarely uses the internet, so probably wouldn't buy books from a desktop connection. So he'd have to buy them online from within the Kindle itself with no local customer support available, which even to me seems like a confusing interface (it's not quite as bad as trying to navigate Google Play on a smartphone, but it's not great).
  - josh2600 13y ago
    Confusion is an opportunity to provide education and build consumer trust. If you're breaking intended behavior you need to pacify the confusion that results (this is a social capital creation opportunity). I do appreciate your point though and I think it's just another example of B&N having poor marketing.

chollida1 13y ago

Meta note... The HN title perfectly matches the articles title but the first line of the article actually says: "Barnes & Noble laid off its Nook hardware engineers, according to a source that tipped Business Insider." I only point this out because in North America, fired and laid off have two very different connotations.

MBCook 13y ago
I think in this situation it's pretty clear that it means "will no longer employ" without the with/without cause distinction.
justin66 13y ago
> I only point this out because in North America, fired and laid off have two very different connotations. ... to almost no one who does not work at a state unemployment office. I kid. More accurate snark would be to say "to everyone except the person just fired/laid off." A friend who was just laid off mentioned the way certain people feel the need to correct her when she mentions she was fired, and how hugely annoying that is. I experienced a similar thing years ago amongst my former coworkers after a large firing-I-mean-lay off. It all seems to have something to do with making everyone except the person just fired/laid off maintain a certain level of comfort, even though everyone understands that the effect of the thing is exactly the same. (back in the day it was probably all about whether the factory was going to call you back in eventually or not)
- gutnor 13y ago
  Remember after getting laid off at my first job in London. I didn't know about the difference, my boss kept reminding me that I was not getting fired, but "terminated" As a foreigner, I only knew the lethal meaning of the term.
- pavedwalden 13y ago
  To me, "laid off" means it was structural, whereas "fired" implies that the specific individual was deliberately gotten rid of. Also, I think "fired" carries a connotation of blame. You don't get laid off for calling your boss an asshole, you get fired.