Business Models

Business Processes – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Looks to the Future

 You have to like this quote.

Before long, “user-generated content” won’t refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meats.

Source: Business Processes – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Looks to the Future

An we thought Amazon sold books.

But my point is less to do with Amazon, than it is to do with the Bezos vision.  Amazon as a company that lets users generate whatever content they have in mind.

This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog — and the repercussions would be earthshaking.

That’s the future Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos hopes to set in motion with the company’s new direction. If you tease out Bezos’ plan, you get to a point where a high school cheerleader sitting at home with a laptop could theoretically harness computing power, design capabilities, manufacturing and distribution from around the world, and make and market a cute little pink hot rod that would compete against General Motors.

Amazon as a facilitator of retail outlets to sell anything.

You can rent space on Amazon’s computers to run a business, or rent out its transaction capabilities to sell things and collect money, or rent pieces of its warehouses and distribution system to store and ship items — or all of the above.

So, with almost no start-up costs, anyone anywhere could become a retailer. It’s not just contracting with Amazon to sell your stuff, the way Target does. It’s leasing pieces of Amazon to create something totally unrelated to Amazon.

“We can take all the things that used to be fixed costs and let people pay by the drink,” Bezos says. “It’s letting people create a business by remote control.”

Its an amazing vision.  Its also the first time I have heard ANYONE talk about the real business potential for internet, beyond technology, and software as a service etc etc etc.

What about user generated bank products.  We have product groups go to extreme lengths to design products, but those are based on Banks’ needs.  What about a product set designed by a customer, and priced accordingly, or auctioned to the best bidder?

Its a fascinating vision that conjures up all kinds of possibilities.

 

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