But Amazon has been working towards this for a long time indeed. When I searched the web for
Bezosand
ecosystem, the first page of hits included a story from June 2000, in which a senior manager at HP acknowledged that he had gotten ecosystem thinking from talking to Jeff Bezos.
Recent developments by Amazon and eBay (as described by David Sprott and Lawrence Wilkes at the CBDi Forum) establish a business service stack for the eCommerce sector.
But this isn't just a clever tactical move. It follows logically from a strategic direction that Amazon has been pursuing for a considerable time. During the dot-Com boom, there was lots of superficial admiration of Amazon, and lots of companies trying to emulate it. But few of them mastered ecosystem thinking, and few of them survived the downturn.
Alan Deutschman, Inside the mind of Jeff Bezos (Fast Company, 1 August 2004)
Steve Hardy, Guidelines from the Book of Bezos (Creative Generalist, 5 August 2004)
Robert D Hof, Reprogramming Amazon (Business Week, 22 December 2003)
David Jastrow, HP Keynote embraces ecosystem thinking (CRN, 15 June 2000)
Lawrence Wilkes, Amazon and eBay Web Services (CBDI Journal, October 2004)
Related posts: Binary Advice (July 2004), Amazon and Ebay (August 2004), Business as a Platform - Amazon (May 2012), The Idea of Showrooming (July 2017)
For more on ecosystem thinking, see my 2001 book on Component-Based Business. Available from Amazon (of course).
links updated 11 March 2020
