O Amazonie, Google+ i platformach

Świetny tekst o tym, skąd się wzięła platforma Amazona (spoiler: z autorytarnego edyktu Jeffa Bezosa, który jest jeszcze większym wizjonerem, niż możnaby się spodziewać):

You wouldn’t really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they’d built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform.

(…)

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

.. a także: dlaczego Google nie ma pojęcia o tworzeniu platform, Google+ nie działa, a Facebook tak. Napisany z dużą złośliwością przez pracownika Google, który kiedyś pracował w Amazonie. Masa anegdot i ciekawostek, które nie miały trafić do szerokiej publiczności. Warte lektury.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.