doing one thing well
There’s a ton of business advice out there, and I tend to get one idea stuck in my head - do one thing, and do it well. There’s a similar idea behind the concept of the Unix shell and commands, although arguably fragmentation has muddied the waters quite a bit.
The tough part seems to be balancing what you think you do best against missed opportunities. Amazon saw the potential to lease out it’s datacenter, which is a huge shift toward developer-facing web services, from direct customer-facing web sites.
I don’t know yet whether this is a good or bad move for them, but it certainly takes guts. I wonder what kind of internal decision-making route this took, to get from someone’s idea to final implementation; it’s surprising to see this from a company already seeing huge success in it’s core business.
I guess I can see parallels in Google and Microsoft, who were able to parlay dominance in one area to success in others. Still, they tend to only actually be wildly successful in one area, and use that to support ventures in the others.
