I spent the earliest part of my life in a pastoral village with a single road and a population well below a hundred. Originally it was formed in the early 1880s when the railway was constructed. My father sometimes talks of the days when rail travel across the country was par for the course with what sounds to my ears something like a mix between nostalgia and mourning.
I never really understood why that is, the railroads were simply superceded by more efficient forms of passenger transporation which made the idea of supporting a commuter transport network to such a backwater as Ben Bullen completely irrational. There's still an urban rail network supporting the far more densely populated Sydney basin, however no operating commuter stations like Ben Bullen exist any longer, despite the nostalgia of older generations.
People tend to have difficulty making a full critical analysis of the thing that they value in a given experience, a long trip on a train to an exciting, distant destination may have a propensity to infuse in a person some of the emotion that came with the journey onto the form of transportation itself, despite the fact that under examination, the two are very clearly separate.
Even (especially?) businesspeople have a habit of misunderstanding the nature of the market that they find themselves in, illustrated well by the decline of the commuter rail network industry serving small ports of call like Ben Bullen. People didn't want to catch trains, they wanted to get somewhere. The more immersed a person is in the implementation and details of their craft, the easier it is to get distracted or confused about the utility of what they're providing.
It takes a special kind of self awareness to step back and disassemble the entire intricate edifice, critically analysing as one proceeds. The kinds of companies that can do this today we label disruptors, and the kinds of companies that can't are scared to death of them. Like the railway corporations of the previous generation who thought they were selling train fares when they were really selling transportation, today's big publishers think they're selling sheafs of bound paper containing the printed word when they're really selling media.
"I'm not the bad guy, you're the bad guy, so ner!"
It doesn't make good press to be seen as a Luddite standing in the way of progress, so rather than outright opposing the inevitable advance of technology, those whose best interests have been served by hindering it prefer to work sideways. They cast themselves as the knight errant valiantly stemming the tide of the money grubbing "other" so that they might support the human capital invested so heavily in their little version of the status quo. It is not relevant whether they are conscious of this and it is a cynical tactic or if they truly believe it. From a strategic perspective; the end result is the same.
Shall we iterate the battles, and the epitaphs?
Blacksmiths;
Trade lobbyists for farriers petitioned in support of laws mandating separate roads for horse drawn vehicles and automobiles, attempting to stifle the burgeoning auto industry and squeeze a little more gold out of their dying trade. In the meantime other parts of the trade adapted and started making tires.
Music & Movie Industry;
Lawsuits, price fixing, payola, lobbying, red scare style propaganda pushing on the perils of copyright infringement, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world by a dispruptor, you get the idea.
News Industry;
A little closer to the mark, instead of proceeding through excessively litigious channels, rattling the sabre constantly about walling off their precious content whilst actually doing very little. It might be a tiny little bit less obvious what they were doing if they just actually said "Make us an offer, please, we're lost.". Disruptor in question completely misses the point and tells them all about robots.txt, hilarity ensues.
Book Industry;
Seeking to subsidise the printing press with the commercial advantage of eBook publication by not acknowledging the enormous economic disparity between the two distribution methods in their pricing. Someone could potentially sue me if I just out and out call it price fixing and/or tying, so I won't do that.
Conclusion
Amazon is not my favourite company, they are somewhat ham-fisted, as both the MacMillan, and the previous episode shows, but at the end of the day, they do tend to figure out the right path or the closest thing that is available to them given a paucity of options from the real culprit in this particular instance.
The one silver lining to the entire affair is that the illustrious alumni discussed above looks to be exactly the kind of place for a company like MacMillan to end up.
I like the idea of that.
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