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A Case Study on Case Studies

In recent posts, we’ve pretty well beaten to death the topic of e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, but this is a significant technology trend that stands to make major revolutionary changes to large segments of the economy, so we figure one more post won’t hurt.

The Financial Times reported today on the Kindle’s adoption by some forward-thinking American universities: “Electronic Books Kindle Learning at US Universities.”

As part of a pilot program, Amazon is making its Kindle DX (large screen) readers available to a hand full of universities at a deep discount, and the universities are in turn making them available to students in certain programs for free.  For those readers who suffered though one too many case studies in MBA programs, this part should be interesting:

Unlike the undergraduate colleges in the DX scheme that are mainly using the devices as a replacement for standard textbooks, Darden [School of Business at the University of Virginia] is using the device for case studies, a traditional teaching tool of all the top business schools.

Darden is the second-largest producer of case studies in the world after Harvard Business School. If Darden can get this right, there are huge business opportunities for it to sell its case studies through Amazon in the same way that management books and audio lectures are sold….

Typically, Darden students get 600 cases to read during their two years at college, a significant amount of material. So Darden’s senior administrators, like their counterparts elsewhere, believe the DX (and potentially other e-readers) could have a positive environmental impact and reduce the strain on students’ backs and bank balances. Indeed, one of the biggest attractions of electronic texts is their lower cost.

In an unrelated story, we also read this morning that Google is preparing to aggressively challenge Apple’s iPhone in the smart phone market with its Android operating system (”Google’s Android Bites Apple“).  We found these comments particularly interesting:

Gartner, the research group, sees Android eating into Nokia’s leading market share and featuring on 18 per cent of smartphones by 2012, up from 1.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2009. That would put it ahead of RIM on 13.9 per cent and Apple on 13.6 per cent.

Android will inevitably beat the iPhone, according to Ken Dulaney, a Gartner analyst, if only because it will feature on many more handset models. Apple has only the iPhone and does not license its operating system or technology.

Could it be that Apple is on its way to making the same mistake with the iPhone that it did with the Macintosh computer in the 1980s when it kept its operating system closed — and thus let the technically inferior Microsoft / IBM clone machine become the industry standard?  It will be interesting to watch.  The smart phone should soon be reaching the shake-out phase in which weaker competitors get driven out of the market.  We’re still not there yet, but we likely will be in just a few years.  It will be interesting to see who the last man standing will be.

Charles Sizemore, CFA
Co-author of the recently-published Boom or Bust: Understanding and Profiting from a Changing Consumer Economy