Think Like Amazon by John Rossman

Author:John Rossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Are you trapped in one primary business?

2. Are there opportunities to expand into new industries or new ways to serve existing clients?

3. How could a launch-and-learn strategy be used in your business?

DON’T GIVE AWAY THE OPERATING SYSTEM

Partners, Vendors, and Strategy

Gary went flying.

—Bill Gates

On July 8, 1994, Gary Kildall—the American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.—suffered traumatic injuries when he fell or was beaten at a biker bar in Monterey, California. He died in a hospital three days later. An autopsy indicated Kildall suffered symptoms associated with chronic alcoholism.1 An ignominious end to the man many believe is the “real” Bill Gates.

What’s that? Never heard of Gary Kildall? Unfortunately, he’s perhaps best known for an apocryphal tale at the birth of the personal computer revolution. Kildall was the genius behind CP/M, the original and dominant operating system at the time. In 1980, IBM approached Kildall with an offer to license CP/M for their stealth PC business. According to lore, Kildall was not present when the IBM representatives showed up unannounced. Kildall was a pilot, and he was out flying, but to another business appointment. That’s not really what happened, of course. At the time, Kildall’s wife handled negotiations, and based on the advice of their lawyer, she allegedly balked at signing a nondisclosure agreement. Ultimately, the delay in negotiations gave the Bill Gates we know today enough time to propose an alternative operating system, 86-DOS, which borrowed heavily from CP/M. Later in life, Kildall would call

idea 30: Don’t outsource strategic or critical decision-making. Create processes, data flows, decision trees and algorithms, and systems seeking to optimize critical functions across the enterprise. Use partners and vendors for tactical execution, and build the rules and optimization engine as your intellectual property. Integrate real-time data to feed into this decision-making.

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