These are the slides from the talk I gave at Amazon's All Hands meeting on May 20, 2003. I'm uploading it now because I'm referencing it in my forthcoming book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up To Us, due from Harper Business in October 2017, and want people to be able to take a look at it. This is of historical interest only.
4. What We Really Do
ā¢ "Big Hairy Audacious Goal": Changing
the world by capturing the knowledge of
innovators
ā¢ That is: Find interesting people and
technologies and amplify their
effectiveness by spreading the information
needed for others to follow them.
ā¢ Keep finding new, transformative
technologies that we can catalyze.
5. Watching the "Alpha Geeks"
"The future is here, it's just
not evenly distributed yet."
-William Gibson
6. Watching Amazon
ā¢ 1997: A friend tells me she's
buying a computer to use
Amazon. That was the original
definition of a "killer app."
ā¢ But people were still thinking of
the web browser as the
application, and so they didn't
think of Amazon and its peers as
applications.
7. Paradigm Shift: A Change in World
View That Calls Everything You
Know Into Question
9. Not Just Software: "Infoware"
ā¢ Editorial content as part of the
user interface
ā¢ Users help to build the product
ā¢ The product changes every day
ā¢ The Internet, not the PC, is the
platform
11. A History Lesson
ā¢ Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, the killer
apps of the personal computer era, are
displaced by Microsoft Excel and
Word
ā¢ Netscape Navigator, the killer app of
the first Internet era, is displaced by
Microsoft Internet Explorer
ā¢ A platform strategy beats an
application strategy every time!
12. Technology Evolution
ā¢ Hackers push the envelope.
ā¢ Entrepreneurs make things easier for ordinary
users.
ā¢ Dominant players integrate into a platform,
raising barriers to entry. Progress stagnates, as
hackers and entrepreneurs move on, looking
for new frontiers.
Or (sometimes)
ā¢ The industry builds a healthy ecosystem, in
which hackers, entrepreneurs and platform
players play a creative game of "leapfrog". No
one gets complete lock in, and everyone has to
improve in order to stay competitive.
15. Amazon Web Services
ā¢ An explosion of creativity as
Amazon opens its data for reuse
by others.
ā¢ A business model that creates a
virtuous circle of increasing sales.
ā¢ Amazon becomes even more
definitively the source for product
information and ecommerce.
18. Two Types of Platform
ā¢ One Ring to Rule Them All
ā¢ Small Pieces Loosely Joined
19. Small Pieces Loosely Joined
ā¢ An architecture of participation means that your
users help to extend your platform.
ā¢ Low barriers to experimentation mean that the
system is "hacker friendly" for maximum
innovation.
ā¢ Interoperability means that one component or
service can be swapped out if a better one comes
along.
ā¢ "Lock-in" comes because others depend on the
benefit from your services, not because you're
completely in control.
20. Questions?
ā¢ Need not just be about the talk
ā¢ For more information:
http://www.oreilly.com
http://tim.oreilly.com
http://conferences.oreilly.com
http://www.oreillynet.com