herrlich, diese Story ist einfach nur herrlich. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels auf seinem Weblog:
Today Shel Israel and Robert Scoble stopped by at Amazon to present their book Naked Conversations in our Fishbowl series. As you can read in Shel’s observations and Robert’s they appear shocked that we used a critical voice to address their work. Welcome to life at Amazon, we set a very high bar for our own works and we expect anyone that comes to sell us an approach to actually be prepared to really defend their ideas. Just because blogs are cool and everybody is doing them does not automatically mean that we should institutionalize them at Amazon. We have a long history of promoting customers to use their voice about our products and our operations, so if you come to Amazon to tell us our business is going to really suffer if we do not blog, you better be prepared to defend your ideas with very strong arguments and hard evidence. We expect that from anyone, externally or internally, who wants to promote an idea within Amazon.
This was my approach with challenging Shel and Robert at our lunch meeting. I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly. I have been a promoter of weblogging for a long time, so I didn’t feel particularly bad to challenge these two authors to tell me why customers would get a better Amazon product if we would institutionalize blogging at a wider scale around Amazon. Beyond „a more human face“ and „conversations with individuals from Amazon“ there was no real response how blogging will make the product named Amazon.com better for our customers given all the techniques we already use from soliciting customer feedback to discussion forums to snooping weblogs and comments sites, etc,. In my mind they had no solid data-driven answers to these challenges, which I would have expected from two seasoned evangelists. I myself actually knew some of the answers to my questions, but I was surprised to see that these guys were not prepared enough to slap me around with solid answers.
Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly.. geil geil geil… ich kann mir die beiden Faces richtig gut ausmalen 🙂 Und was mich dabei am meisten wundert? Kann es tatsächlich sein, daß den beiden Jungs noch nirgendwo voher dieser Wind ins Gesicht geblasen hat? Ganz ehrlich: Ich hatte noch never ever ein Gespräch, mit wem auch immer in D, ohne dass zuerst scharf geschossen wurde und erst nachher gefragt. Sind US-Geschäftsleute so eazy? Das wäre ja traumhaft billig. Wie dem auch sei. Dieser CTO… ich mag den 🙂 Der Bursche ist nach meinem Geschmack.
Und er kann auch eigentlich ganz lieb sein, wie er am Ende betont: If you read the posting well, you will find that ROI does not appear in it. That is on purpose as the questions about innovation and about providing value need to be answered first before you can talk about at what cost.
