BBC NEWS | Business | Lessons from Silicon Valley
Peter Day offers another excellent column on business and the future (or now if you know about this stuff already).
Quite interesting to note the fundamanetal flaw in Excite mentioned here:
Lesson two says: the internet is a new sort of market place that needs new business plans to make it work. ...But Excite took the conventional view that the ads would come from the top 100 companies in the USA, the people who buy huge amount of TV time and blanket the newspapers and the magazines.Google did not go for the big spenders. Google's squads of PhDs wrote algorithms that would make it viable for the company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.
So lesson number two is about the new markets created by the internet, the ones making big profits for Google quarter by quarter.
"The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people," observes Mr Kraus.
Classic stuff about Long Tail (as Peter mentions) but no real point about co-creation and community. Amazon and Google both inspire community involvement in terms of development (both allow people to interact with the service via APIs to work with the software and develop new applications) and participation Amazon with reviews and its shops programme and Google with its ad services.
Its a shame that that aspect is missing from Peter's review as I think ultimately millions of markets is going to be about co-creation as the markets are far more demanding and creative than businesses can be on their own... thoughts anyone?
Posted by Paul Goodison at June 24, 2005 11:46 AM | TrackBack