Amazon DevCon - Rael Dornfest
Posted on 21.01.05 at 05:28 CET
Several well-known technologists and software developers were invited to an internal conference for the development staff at amazon.com headquarters this week. Most corporations would close an event like this to outsiders, which is what Amazon has done also. The major difference being that they’ve been blogging highlights of the talks to the rest of the world via the Amazon Web Services Blog. They’re basically killing two birds with one stone: scoring top marks for openness and simultaneously showing potential recruits the kind of perks that come with working there. They “get it” and also attract people who “get it”.
Anyway, this brings me to the talk given by Rael Dornfest, the creator of blosxom. Even though the transcript was somewhat limited by its stenographed style it managed to get my pulse racing in one of those someone’s transcribing my (not very original) thoughts! moments.
A few choice fragments:
If your customers are breaking your stuff in a certain way, they are telling you what your product should be. Incumbents get nervous and try to put the sword back in to the stone.
You can still make great products, don’t have to own everything.
BitTorrent, is real video on demand, it scares everyone except the users. NetFlix scares the hell out of Blockbuster.
Watch what the customers do, team up with them.
Remix your OS. Mac OS 9 > OS X for this. Apple threw “fluffy designer bunnies” together with Unix hackers and grew a community of designer hackers. Sometimes you have to break your own eggs. Mac people know that their machines are hackable. Great waste of time, better than Tetris.
It is all about people and connections to each other.
And there’s plenty more where those came from…
There are no comments for this entry.