- One-click shopping
- Free shipping over $25
- Being first to market with a meaningful and usable, but predatory, offering for self-publishers
- Creating a used-book marketplace
- Fighting a supply-chain battle with on-demand printers
- Undercutting Lulu, the pioneering self-publishing operation catering to authors
- Booting up the Amazon Affiliate program
- Making it brain-dead simple to publish on the Kindle
- Creating a margin option structure fr Kindle publishers
- Once the traditional supply chain had been sufficiently weakened, ramping up direct relationships with authors
- Starting with an eBook experience
- Decisively promoting ebooks
- All the while, keeping the core shopping experience familiar
Friday, December 16, 2011
Venkatesh Rao
To take the book industry as an example, Amazon took on every part of the supply chain, not just retail. The whole company began, not with an idea, but a data-driven decision. Let’s take inventory of its major moves over the last decade or so.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why Amazon Is The Best Strategic Player In Tech
ReplyDeletehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/14/the-amazon-playbook/
Unlike the other big companies that symbolize our times — Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft — Amazon did not rise to power by inventing a new product or service. It came to power by systematically taking down an entire existing industry. It is a story that called for strategic depth, not technical wizardry, design brilliance or sheer energy. In the technology world, nobody holds up Amazon engineers as extraordinary geniuses or its designers as Da Vincis. They are good, but not great. Yet, time and again, Amazon wins.
ReplyDeleteWhen you look at the evolution of the Amazon universe, you can tell that move by move, Amazon looks at the state of play, takes stock of its advantages, and works to make those advantages irresistible. So irresistible that other players are forced to treat them as constraints and a cost of doing business rather than things to be countered. You can tell that there is very calculated timing behind every move. Certain moves are only attempted when the opposition is sufficiently weakened.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps the central element of the story is the degree to which Amazon pursues a pragmatic, realpolitik approach to relationships. Sharing a playing field with Amazon is like swimming with a shark.