Did the Riggio Brothers Fail Barnes and Noble?
I’ve often bemoaned on this site the failure of Barnes and Noble to grab a piece of the online bookselling pie. I don’t do this out of any special interest toward the success of B&N, but rather out of a dim hope that one day they will someday open up a 3rd party marketplace, a la Amazon, for us independent sellers (they’re close).
Back in the mid-1990s, before he was CEO, Stephen Riggio (pictured, brother of owner, Leonard Riggio) told the Wall Street Journal, “We have to be a player … Online bookselling is going to be a very big thing.” His vision was spot on, this we know. Nevertheless, the Riggio concept of taking a piece of this pie was, from the outset, too cautious to ever make B&N a big time player in the online market. Rumors abound about a potential purchase or partnership with Amazon, but Bezos was smart enough to keep his share for himself. In early 1997, B&N partnered with America Online as the exclusive bookseller for the ISP. Had, at the time Riggio fully invested/risked in the online marketplace, B&N would be one of the strongest companies of the day. As it is now, their website continually disappoints, showing only modest sales growth, tremendously below industry averages (see my previous post).
So back to the question - did the Riggio’s fail B&N? - that is hard to say. It certainly seems like they had the vision, but lacked the entrepreneurial guts to invest in its online marketplace and to take on Amazon. Could this be a future Harvard case study? I’d sure like to read it…
