The Invisible Cloud
June 12, 2014
Grazed from HuffingtonPost. Author: Phil Simon.
There’s no one right way to launch products and services today, a point that I make in The Age of the Platform. Consider the two vastly different approaches that two iconic companies took to achieve equally impressive results. As Brad Stone writes in The Everything Store, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stressed the importance of getting big fast from the get-go.
He astutely recognized that the Internet in 1994 was effectively a land grab. If his company established strong relationships with its customers, many would have a hard time switching. I’d argue that he was right. One can hardly quibble with Bezos’ results over the last 20 years. Contrast that strategy with Mark Zuckerberg’s much more measured approach at Facebook…
Remember that, up until 2006, the social network used to be restricted to college and university students. (No .edu email address? No Facebook account. Period.) Zuck had to manage the insatiable demand for Facebook, telling prominent institutions that they would have to wait. Facebook just wasn’t ready to expand as quickly as millions of students would have liked. The precocious twentysomething CEO knew that, if Facebook repeatedly crashed due to exponentially growing traffic and infrastructure issues, his company could go the way of Friendster. He may very well only get one bite at the apple. Again, the results have been impressive…
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