Innovation can be visible in the mission statement.

Recently, I checked a few mission statements:

Google: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. "

Amazon: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."


Both have some interesting similarities:
1. To be the global leader 
2. To specify its value to its customers
3. They don't talk about a specific product as they have the ambition not to stick to their core business, but rather to continuously grow themselves in new domains.
4. They don't talk about a channel, as they don't want to be constrained by specific channels.

Now compare that to the mission statement of Barnes & Noble:

Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America, regardless of the product we sell. Because the product we sell is books, our aspirations must be consistent with the promise and the ideals of the volumes which line our shelves. ....

Quite a difference, no?

Amazon coins

Amazon will introduce their own "currency": the Amazon Coin.
See link here for more details on the announcement: Amazon Coins

It again illustrates how Amazon continuously keeps rethinking and expanding their business model.  So, this is supposed to be for the app developers....right?  Or is this just the beginning of something much bigger?

My favorite quotes from this interview with Larry Page

My favorite quotes from a must-read interview with Larry Page published today:

Interview Larry Page

"But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change."



"A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products. Whether you’re in Chrome or Search or Gmail, it’s just Google, with one consistent look and feel. It’s not a good user experience if there are 50 different ways to share something. That requires integration."

"But show me a company that failed because of litigation. I just don’t see it. Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition."

Intermediary platforms require a different mindset

I a previous article I discussed Why platforms can be so disruptive as an intermediary in the ecosystem.
In this article, I want to dive a bit deeper into the mindset it takes to think in terms as Platforms, as opposed to thinking in Projects.

Apple has become a phone company.

Asymco makes a nice analysis and visual of Apple's P&L and how it evolves year by year.
Check out this link for all details:

http://www.asymco.com/?s=Apple%27s+income&submit=Go

At the left a detail from their overview for Q22012.
One can immediately see that their gross profit is by far generated by only 2 products, the iPhone and the iPad.  the Mac gross margin is marginal in comparison.
Amazing if you know that Apple doesn't even produce these devices themselves.
Remains the question of course if such gross margins are sustainable.  Time will tell, but I doubt.

Innovation vs Transformation

Over the last 5 years, Nokia lost 82% of its market value, while Apple's value increased with 587%.
Did Nokia fail to innovate?  No.  Apple just transformed the market.

Technology Platforms can enable new intermediaries with disruptive power.

Since our world is becoming more and more information rich and information dependent, information technology can become the enabler to aggregate information services in new platforms.  And such platforms can have a very disruptive influence on the business ecosystem.  These platforms can not only facilitate transactions, but actually have the power to take over the governance of the business ecosystem.  This platform which is aggregating and governing services, is symbolized with the green ball in the figure.
Where is this disruptive power coming from?