Thomas Otter

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It is full of excellent nuggets. Obsess about your customers, not your competitors. Invent. Think long term. Be prepared to be misunderstood.  I wonder how many other CEO’s could present their business principles in this precise yet genuine way?  I believe the presentation was mainly aimed at the employees of Zappos. Amazon recently acquired them.  If I was a Zappos employee this would go a long way to making me feel welcome. 

Last night I was chatting to a colleague of mine in the US about ERP’s future. We then ended up discussing the history of the software industry. At what point do the ERP vendors of today face significant new forms of competition, and how will they react, what will threaten them, who will adapt and who won’t?  History can be a useful guide. We briefly touched on DEC, IBM, Dun&Bradstreet, Cullinet, ADR and so on. I suggested that he read Martin Campbell-Kelly’s excellent "from Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog- A history of the software Industry."  While we were talking he ordered it on his Kindle so that he could read it on the beach. He then proceeded to convince me that the Kindle was "awesome", which in turn then led me to read some Gartner Research on e-paper so that I could figure out how the Kindle could work in bright sunlight when I should have been working on my e-Recruitment Magic Quadrant.

The Kindle has started a bit of a blaze (bad pun I know). I’m following the "1984" incident with interest. Bezos’s apology was rapid, genuine and appropriate, but as Cory Doctorow points out, there are more issues around the Kindle that require resolution.  The Kindle is not only creating issues for Amazon, it is creating challenges for copyright law, publishers, and authors. How this plays out will impact fundamentally how we read. That is a big responsibility.

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