It’s been two and a half years since I started working for Google. Now, as I walk out the door, I’m going to try to capture some of my thoughts about the experience and share them here.
In the summer of 2007, as I was finishing up my MBA, I was faced with a choice of [...]
My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys. One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device. She is a scientist who is very much an information worker. Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her. (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!) She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing. So she’s often reading her kindle on…
...full articleAmazon has a history of facilitating disruptive change. First by selling books online, they demonstrated the advantages of a well-run online store. Then with music, movies and just about everything else, they have shown that centralizing inventory and customer experience allows for reduced costs and an improved experience over a traditional distributed retail model. Today, Amazon Web Services is starting to disrupt IT operations similarly by providing a higher quality service at lower cost than most companies can manage themselves. They achieve these scale economies through centralization. With Kindle Amazon is attempting another disruptive change, this time in the way…
...full articleA trend in modern successful websites is the democratization of information and decision making. The so-called wisdom of the crowds is at the heart of what makes a web 2.0 company successful. I’m going to compare how three companies have democratized the process of making product development decisions. Amazon makes extensive use of so-called A/B testing to try out new UI’s and optimize the user flow. This works very well for them because their end goal is very well defined: they want people to buy stuff. They are facing a very hard optimization problem, but their objective function is clear…
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