Amazon and innovation
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is the media's favorite love/hate boy, vacillating between genius to dolt as his stock price see-saws with the collective effervescence of the Internet's potential. However, it can not be denied that for the last 10 years he's charted a really exciting course in the development of three major platforms: the web as storefront (Amazon.com), the web as underlying fabric for computing (EC2/S3, etc.), and the web/device ecosystem for consuming content (Kindle). This month he seems to be on top again, with great articles in Businessweek and Wired describing both the company's ability to innovate and its cloud computing initiative.
For those of us now familiar with the way big tech companies think, the best quote is one he gives Businessweek on how to drive innovation:
Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?(via O'Reilly Radar)
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore.
If the last year of HP life has taught me anything on this score, it is that this skills-vs-customer-needs issue is the club that anyone who interested in protecting fiefdoms will use to kill innovative but risky ideas. It has many guises, from "we don't know anything about X," to "how could we possibly get X to Y scale," but at the end of the day it ends up feeling like the same thing: "we're already good at X so why don't we do X+incremental instead of something totally new!" Fortunately, there are ways of mitigating this: buy new skills, bring in outsiders, empower the mavericks, realize that X is going away and freak out— but all of these take time and don't come without pain.
That said, all of this customer-focus goodness also strikes me as a bit glib and this week's Amazon media coverage of the cloud computing initiatives points to why: when Amazon started S3/EC2, there was no way that there were customers clamoring for what they've built. No one came to the front door saying "wow, you guys are at 10% utilization, wouldn't it be cool if you could rent me some virtual servers?" and yet, much in the same way Apple has done time and time again, Bezos & crew were able to see evolving trends coalescing into a solution they thought customers would want.
I'm all for listening to the customer, and I'm certainly all for thinking like the customer, but it's important to realize that— at least in technology— there is something at the moment of initial creation that requires creative insight in a way that listening to what your customers want just doesn't allow. Something about skating to where the puck is going to be comes to mind...
Hi, I'm Antonio, living in Boston and working this whole net thing out...
Josh commented, on April 26, 2008 at 2:47 p.m.:
I see a consumer vs. enterprise thing going on here, too. Google, Apple, and Amazon have very little to do with enterprises, and that gives them more space to maneuver. If you're Microsoft or EMC, servicing your huge clients and their existing infrastructure is so important to the bottom line, there's little internal mindshare to spend on what's next.
HP has enough of itself in consumer that I think it can still make some moves into cloud.