The Ways to New

Chapter 6Asset-Based Disruption

Take inventory of what you are good at and extend out from your skills,” Jeff Bezos once said.¹ He has definitely been following his own advice.

I certainly do not believe Jeff Bezos sat down in 1993 and thought, I'm going to start a virtual bookstore. The first thing he did was to devise a platform, combining top-of-the-line IT with breakthrough logistics. I imagine he then considered which sectors would suffer the most damage from the onslaught of this new infrastructure technology. Those that were the most vulnerable in terms of efficiency. He chose books because his platform was ideally suited to a highly fragmented market, characterized by massive stocks and small retailers.

Amazon: The Power of Infrastructure

The “Earth's Biggest Bookstore,”² as claimed by Jeff Bezos, the very day of its opening, has proved to be an outstanding platform that evolves day after day. Building the capacity to take in millions of orders from millions of customers for hundreds of thousands of products, then source these products and ship them, involves investing huge sums. In the first ten years of its life, Amazon spent close to one billion dollars on infrastructure. And their top priority is to keep on building what will remain forever a core asset.

As Henry Chesbrough puts it in his bestseller Open Innovation, “Analysts thought of Amazon as a retailer. In fact, Amazon aspired to be a platform.”³ Well, it certainly is an enterprise with a vision: Jeff Bezos ...