Simon Age of the Platform

How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9829302-6-7
Verlag: Motion Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 312 Seiten

Four companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) have done nothing less than redefine business. In this provocative new book, four-time author Phil Simon examines the platform as the most important business model of the 21st century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simon, Phil

Leseproben

ONE

The Internet: Where Are We Now?

Let’s begin our journey with a high-level summary of the last three decades of what we now call the Internet.* To paraphrase the 1968 Virginia Slims ad, we’ve come a long way, baby. In relatively short periods of time, entire industries have been shattered. New ones have come and gone. These advancements and changes have been nothing less than astounding, causing seismic shifts in many areas of society beyond the business world. Moreover, each trend and development has brought us to where we are now: the Age of the Platform.

But we can only understand this new age—and how we arrived here—by first taking a look at where we have been. Let’s start.

WEB 1.0 (1993 TO EARLY 2005)

In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic (soon to be rebranded as Netscape), the first web browser and the progenitor of the Internet. As the 1990s progressed, the Internet quickly gained traction. Early adopters took to creating their own primitive web pages, browsing existing pages, and sending email and, later, instant messages (IMs). Netscape’s initial public offering (IPO) in August 1995 served as a wake-up call to the world. In 1996, company co-founder Marc Andreessen found himself on the cover of Time magazine. The Internet had arrived.

By the late 1990s, many of the kinks of ecommerce had been ironed out. Companies such as Yahoo!, go.com, Excite@home, and America Online (AOL) evangelized the flexibility and power of web portals. These soon became all the rage, a fact reflected in these companies’ astronomical valuations and stock prices. Beyond providing the ability to browse the web, portals let users easily view and customize their email, news, stock prices, information, weather, and entertainment. Finally, we had one-stop shopping.

The great Internet bubble had arrived. All kinds of startups launched, promising to remove friction and rewire every industry imaginable, including:

Grocery delivery (Webvan)

Government (gov Works, profiled in the Machiavellian 2001 documentary Startup.com)

Branded fashion apparel (boo.com)

Telephony (Vonage, one of the pioneers of Voice Over Internet Protocol [VOIP])

Google then changed the game with exponentially better search. As Chapter 6 will explain, a few years later, the company found a way to turn eyeballs and clicks into actual dollars—lots of them. And it wasn’t just 20-something dot-com paper billionaires espousing the virtues of ecommerce. Consider the following quote from a February 2000 piece in the Economist:

The Internet seems to be creating the possibility of a permanent worldwide bazaar in which no prices are ever fixed for long, all information is instantly available, and buyers and sellers spend their lives haggling to try to get the best deals.5

Boom! There Goes the Dynamite

By the early 2000s, early adoption of the Internet gave way to its eventual maturation. Because of tenuous business models and excessive hype, the vast majority of dot-coms had imploded by 2001. “New economy” evangelists were proven wrong. Employees at dead startups packed up their offices, and a few remaining companies (Amazon, eBay, Google, etc.) emerged as victors of round one of the Internet Age. Historians noted that the same thing has happened many times before. For instance, in the early 1900s, more than 2,000 firms produced one or more automobiles.6 Those that couldn’t compete with the largest manufacturers were eventually weeded out.

In the early days of the Internet, few people trusted websites to store their credit card information, hold their money, and pay their bills. Online banking was still considered risky. By the end of Web 1.0, however, much of the fear surrounding certain aspects of the Internet had abated. For millions of folks, it was no longer weird to buy things online. Ecommerce was here to stay. In 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 53 million people, or 44 percent of Internet users and one-quarter of all adults, used online banking. Those figures amounted to an increase of 47 percent compared to late 2002,7 a trend that has continued. Today, more than 75 percent of all Americans pay at least some of their bills online.8

Let’s now move to the second incarnation of the web, as it has either directly or indirectly brought about the powerful platforms of today.

WEB 2.0 (MID-2005 TO PRESENT)

The mid-2000s saw a new breed of web services begin to take root—many of which have enabled the Age of the Platform. To be sure, many businesses began to embrace web services to expedite the deployment of powerful new offerings. But make no mistake:Web 2.0 is all about consumers. They are leading the way. At first, social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster, and classmates.com allowed individuals to easily find and connect with one another. For the first time, people could share and exchange information en masse. Blogging exploded in popularity, buoyed by user-friendly sites such as Live Journal, Open Diary, Word Press, Blogger, and Type Pad. You Tube allowed nontechnical folks to easily publish videos that ran the gamut, some of which “went viral” and attracted millions of views.

Over the past five years, we have seen many revolutionary (not evolutionary) changes. The rise of the platform is just one of them. Data storage and personal computers have continued to drop in price. Mobility has exploded and smartphones are nothing short of portable mini-computers. Free software has continued to proliferate. The advent and mass adoption of broadband and mobile technologies have enormous impacts on many aspects of contemporary life for both businesses and consumers. Ditto the explosion of social media and networking sites. In late 2010, Facebook surpassed mighty Google as the premier property on the web.9 (We’ll return to Faceboo frequently in this book.)

Regardless of the precise year in which this occurred, one thing is certain: Today we have firmly entered the second iteration of the web. Monikers such as the social web and Web 2.0* quickly became common parlance in technology circles. It’s clear that the days of occasionally using the Internet for simple email and web browsing are gone forever, looking almost quaint in comparison to today’s cavalcade of activity on the Net. From a technology perspective, we are living in a vastly different world compared to just 10 years ago. It has been transformed by the Internet, which we are constantly using. The full promise of the web has finally arrived.

Social Revolutions and Citizen Journalists

One could write a very big book on just the geopolitical examples the world has seen during the first half of 2011. The near-constant stream of information on Twitter caused the fall of dictatorships and civil unrest in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Tunisia.10 Citizen journalists are now “reporting” major stories well before established news mediums, such as the US Airways plane with 155 passengers forced to land in the Hudson River outside of New York City.

Collaboration across borders means that organizations can access an entire planet of available and inexpensive human resources for a wide array of different projects. People can search many books previously only available in libraries (via Google Books). Blogging, podcasting, and online videos have taken off, giving anybody the ability to broadcast to the world.

The Consumerization of IT

In her 1998 book, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Katie Hafner describes what was considered high-tech in the 1960s. Back then, few people actually worked on computers—and fewer still actually owned them. Those who conceived of the Internet worked on massive and very expensive mainframe computers in large government buildings. They could only connect via complicated programming. Computers just didn’t talk to one another 50 years ago.

From a technological perspective (as well as social and economic ones), the 1960s seem quaint in comparison to today. Those same clunky mainframes contain fractions of the compute power of a modern-day smartphone. Aside from being exponentially more powerful thanks to Moore’s Law,* computers as we know them are also less expensive and more useful. It should be no surprise, then, that they are much more prevalent.

Up until relatively recently, the vast majority of people used “technology,” or at least the most advanced technologies, while at work. This is no longer the case. Long gone are the days in which one would only use a computer—or sophisticated technology in general—while on the clock. Today, technology of all kinds permeates the home, a trend that some have dubbed the Consumerization of IT, a term first popularized by Douglas Neal and John Taylor at CSC’s Leading Edge Forum in 2001.

Blurring of the Lines: The Rise of the Prosumer

Generally speaking, the quality and power of technology at home has at least pulled even with technology at work—if not surpassed it. What’s more, billions of people constantly use a wide array of devices and apps well after they leave the office. The distinction between “at home” and “at work” has blurred, if not become meaningless. One can just about work anywhere these days, spawning the terms...