Exactly. I really struggle to see why companies are often hesitant to cannibalise their own products - because if they don't, somebody else will... The newspapers are lucky to be making that dollar given how slow many of them have been to innovate.

I think Apple's willingness to cannibalise is one reason they're so successful - for example, when the iPod Mini was a very successful product, they stopped selling it and replaced it with the Mini. More industries need to learn from them (especially the movie industry...)

Companies are unwilling to do it because sometimes it means jettisoning people, which is hard to do. Its difficult seeing people who have been with you for 30 years become obsolete, and you have to tell them, "sorry, but you're no use to us anymore." Sometimes you want to try and make the old way work, or just place your head in the sand and let the whole ship go down together.

> Companies are unwilling to do it because sometimes it means jettisoning people, which is hard to do.

The newspaper industry has been quite happy to do this. I survived several rounds of layoffs (plus furloughs and a wage freeze) at Gannett. (Meanwhile, the CEO got a $30M+ retirement bonus...)

The problem is, they've mostly been doing it instead of adjusting to the information era, rather than in conjuction with adjusting.

Agreed. Another consideration is that many newspapers suffer from an outdated ownership structure. I'm not sure about Gannet, but I know some of the others, like Tribune before 2007 and NYT had a problem. They were started by famous businessmen or families that then created a structure to keep the holdings within the family. The problem with this is that their descendants owned the trusts that run the company and were unwilling to forgo the dividends that came their way. People outside the publishing industry are often amazed at how much money these companies gave away to shareholders as dividends and for how long, despite it being clear to everyone else in the world that they should have been keeping the money in the bank.