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The irrelevance of location

15 一月, 2016 - 09:48

Any screen-based activity can be operated anywhere on earth. The Web bookstore Amazon.com, one of the most written about of the new Web-based firms, supplies books to customers who can be located anywhere, from book suppliers who can be located anywhere. The location of Amazon.com matters to neither book buyers nor book publishers. No longer will location be key to most business decisions. We have moved from marketplace to marketspace . To compare marketspace-based firms to their traditional marketplace-based alternatives, one needs to contrast three issues: content (what the buyer purchases), context (the circumstances in which the purchase occurs), and infrastructure (simply what the firm needs in order to do business).

The best way to understand a firm like Amazon.com as a marketspace firm is to simply compare it to a conventional bookstore on the three criteria of content, context, and infrastructure. Conventional bookstores sell books; Amazon.com sells information about books. It offers a vast selection and a delivery system. The interface in a conventional bookstore situation is in a shop with books on the shelves; in the case of Amazon.com, it is through a screen. Conventional bookstores require a shop with shelves, people to serve, a convenient location, and most of all, large stocks of books; Amazon.com requires a fast efficient server and a great database. Try as they might, conventional bookstores can never stock all the books in print; Amazon.com stocks no, or very few, books, but paradoxically, it stocks them all. It really matters where a conventional bookstore is located (convenient location, high traffic, pleasant surroundings); Amazon.com's location is immaterial. Technology is creating many marketspace firms. In doing so, cynics may observe that it is enacting three new rules of retailing: Location is irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.