Oversized, Declared Ambitions

A company having outsized ambitions is something you laugh at… until it comes true. Think of Steve Jobs’ intention to make a “dent in the universe”: laughable until he invented the iPhone and the smartphone market.

Or take Google’s mission statement to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. But at least one could argue that was declared by its founders when they were still college kids, an age when it’s the norm to be hyper-ambitious and unrealistic!

Or look at Amazon. Back in 1997 when the Internet was just getting started, Amazon started off as a book retailer. And yet, even back then, their declared mission made clear their outsized ambitions:
“Amazon.com’s objective is to be the leading online retailer of information-based products and services, with an initial focus on books.”
Within a few years after 1997, this was their updated mission statement:
“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.”
Contrast such open declarations of intent with the secrecy of Apple!

Just 2 years ago, the CEO of a large grocery chain in the US (Whole Foods) said that groceries would be Amazon’s Waterloo. And today? Amazon just bought Whole Foods! With hindsight, such an acquisition seems obvious: after all, groceries account for about 20% of consumer spending; so it was a logical area for Amazon to continue in.

All of which is why Ben Thompson, a tech analyst, said in a recent podcast that “Amazon’s goal is to take a cut of all economic activity”. It would be very foolish to laugh at Amazon’s ambitions. Will they fail in some areas? Definitely. But will they win in many more? Almost certainly. And will their scope keep expanding? It sure looks that way.

The IT industry seems to take to heart that famous line from Apple’s ad:
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Ironically, Thompson says that the Whole Foods CEO may have gotten it right when he called groceries as Amazon’s Waterloo. How?
“Indeed, to the extent Waterloo is a valid analogy, Amazon is much more akin to the British Empire.”
Ha ha! Nice flip: while Waterloo is always used as a term for decisive defeat (Napoleon), it also marked the beginning of an extended period of unprecedented world domination for the other actor of that battle (Britain).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more