echo
tonight i thought i’d take a moment to harass echo. this is another post i’ve long-delayed, in the hopes that something would happen on the website to give me some meat to chew into, but… so far no such thing has happened.
echo is child of best buy, borders, tower records, hastings entertainment, wherehouse music and virgin. and they are proud to tell you that this “group of seven” has over 3,300 retail locations, over $24 billion in annual sales and over 900 million customer transactions per year. they are also proud to tell you this:
Echo’s technology is built around a scalable, fault-tolerant, highly distributed architecture that leverages industry standards to provide maximum functionality, easy configuration and integration with third party applications, and support for a variety of user-facing platforms
and really, who’s technology isn’t, eh? or was that 1999?
Echo is continually expanding and improving its services through the in-house development of cutting edge technology, as well as the cultivation of new technology partnerships with software, service, and hardware companies
yes. no sitting on their laurels here.
congratulations, echo, you’ve said so little in so many words. it’s only news for the players, but i did find a hint (from feb 2002) of what once was, and might be again.
i was tempted to just chuck this note-to-post on the principle that echo doesn’t deserve the space – this is vapor in the purest sense. but, in the interest of a broad overview of this business of music, i thought i should at least mention it. someday, there may be something to comment on, but for now, the big music retailers have gotten together and decided that buzzwords can save their businesses.