On Tesla... I'm not sure it's a good analogy. I don't think you can point to Tesla and say they got lucky anywhere. What will GM/Ford/Toyota/Daimler/Volvo do differently now? Tesla is selling speed/sex appeal/engineering/electric - ie all those companies were already all competing on these dimensions. They can't seem to execute.
Google and Microsoft were plenty capable of executing, they just didn't see what the product they needed to deliver was.
Sounds just like the legacy auto manufacturers. Tesla is a great analogy.
[1]: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1134120_tesla-is-losing...
And as much credit as Bezos gets, the new CEO of Amazon was the one who (as far as I know) was the one who insisted that all Amazons web development be done in a way that made it easy to set up AWS.
Don't know who really thought of it, or designed it well enough to make it work, but hope all those folks were well, well rewarded.
I've heard this too, but I don't think it can possibly be true. That would mean that, at the start, any service or VM etc. you started on AWS would only work during non-peak Amazon hours. So your website or app would be down if the traffic to Amazon's website ramped up. I can't imagine many companies going for that offering. If that was the product that AWS originally offered I can't imagine it would have been successful.
While that's true, at the time I read this "peak Amazon hours" were a few hours on cyber Monday. In fact, that's probably still true.
Disclaimer: I work in non-aws amazon, and my imagination is my own.
>Amazon invented AWS because they had idle computers most of the time to handle peak load, and they thought it would be a good way to monetize them.
That is forward looking.
Google also had zero enterprise experience. Things like MySQL, RFC 1918, VMs were not native by their devs.
So of course boards of these companies held off. Making that move could have tanked the stock as profit went down while they re-invested in their business.
This is the genius of Amazon. Wall Street doesn’t expect growing profit. Instead it’s happy with growing revenues. Allowing Amazon to reinvest into business that have an initial low margin until economy of scale kicks in.
Same was true of Amazon.
At the time, Amazon might not have had enterprise sales teams. But they had deep expertise in running the familiar suite of enterprise software at scale.
which is interesting - because in almost all cases, it's this unproven market that end up upending the business. IBM is an early case, and now electric cars.
So if an existing, well capitalized business would learn from this, they should buck the trend and invest heavily in risky ventures. However, shareholders, esp. conservative shareholders, would not want their existing, certain profit lines be endangered.
In a nutshell, the argument is that successful companies fail to enter new markets because they have good management, not bad one.
In Ford's or IBM's case, a sane manager would not go invest in an unproven market, they rather maximize profits and growth on the market they are most effective at; however, this comes at a cost of missing new opportunities, which makes this a dilemma.
Successful companies could try to create little startups inside the big corporation; however, this rarely works out since you really need the entrepreneural spirit, align compensation to success and freedom without the restrictions of the parent company. The best alternative might be to create a VC arm that can serve later on as merger as acquisitions, but even then, is not guaranteed the startup would want to merge to the parent company nor that it would be the best decision.
Facebook’s approach only works when regulators are asleep at the wheel, but standard oil style monopolies can just print money to cover these costs. Innovation is expensive and can fail regularly just look at Intel or most corporate R&D. Finally milking a dying business model can fail really quickly, just look at say blockbuster.
EVs on the on other hand will, most likely, replace ICE powered cars. With the big difference that existing ICE manufacturers will just switch production to EVs and will be just fine in the new EV world. I do see multiple case studies in that.
But, Google and Microsoft didn't wake up earlier. You mention it's only in retrospect Amazon knew what they were doing; but we also see Microsoft and Google didn't know what they were doing. It wasn't out of charity to Amazon, they simply lacked vision at the time.
Had major auto manufacturers taken Tesla seriously 5-6 years sooner instead of sitting idle, the Tesla doubters might be the smug ones at this point. But Tesla had the vision and the execution.
In both cases, the competition badly miscalculated while the company executed beautifully.