Archive for August, 2007

Amazon is testing the waters (at least in Seattle) with a new service, Amazon Fresh. By no means confuse this with the other recent services they have launched like flexible payment services or EC2 or even S3. No, this new service is not a technology service at all, it is a food delivery service. That’s right, you heard it correctly, a home delivery grocery service.

Now for those of you who were around for the bubble of the late 90s and early 2000, you can recall a company that set out to revolutionize the grocery industry by providing prompt, at home delivery of groceries. It was Webvan, and there were a few others to note, one particularly PeaPod (which the last I checked still exists on the East Coast, it became part of a grocery chain here called Giant). Webvan was the poster child of all things wrong in terms of burning through millions (and when I say millions, I mean like in the 40-50 million dollar range) of dollars and never really delivering on their promise. They had a good run, but ultimately had to close up shop.

Now don’t get me wrong, I loved the concept and had hoped that it would really catch on. I was a firm believer in the company, and at the time, one of my best friends was heading up their advertising department. But for many reasons, they failed and for that matter, the home grocery delivery sector failed. Like they say, time heals all wounds and the time has come for someone to try it again. Why not Amazon, right? The one big undertaking that Webvan had was to build out the distribution centers, that cost million upon millions to construct. Amazon has that covered, they have distribution centers all over the country that they can leverage, how hard could it be to add groceries to your inventory, right? Not only do they have the distribution centers in place, they also have and established business that is generating revenue that allows them to expand into other markets, Webvan did not have this.

In the end, it will be interesting to see how the service grows. Jeff Bezos is a sharp guy, and based on the latest services Amazon has released, he is clearly on to something here and sees markets that are ripe that Amazon can dominate in. Let’s hope this one sticks because I am sure I am like millions of other people who are tired of going to the grocery store!

This little peril of wisdom is compliments of Guy Kawasaki and his “Art of Innovation” speech. Guy says that it is OK if your product has some crappy aspects in version 1.0, it is to be expected, but you better work the kinks out as soon as version 2.0 ships or you will be in trouble. His example is that if Apple would have waited for all of the great technologies, they would have never shipped the Macintosh.

I am not so sure that I agree wholeheartedly with this approach, I would take a slightly different approach to it. Instead of accepting the fact that your product is going to be crappy in version 1.0, but go ahead and ship it, how about reducing the features of the product and really nailing the ones that are in the product? That way when you ship it, it may have less features than you originally wanted, but the features that it does have are rock solid. Perhaps this is what Guy is getting at, but the way the statement reads it leads you to believe that it is OK to ship version 1.0 of the product and have it be crappy.

My real world experience recently with the don’t worry, be crappy philosophy was with Verizon and their recent upgrade to their FIOS TV manager software. I guess that they felt launching an upgrade to all of their customers that was crappy was OK, they could work the kinks out at a later date. Man were they ever wrong! I spent the better half of an hour last night trying to get the manager to work, and it was messing up left and right. Verizon customers would have been better off if they would have just left well enough along and left us with the old manager, but no. Now, I along with all of their other FIOS TV customers, are stuck dealing with the inadequacies of the product until they can fix it. I would expect this from a young company that is launching their product for the first time, but not from an established, mature company like Verizion. On second thought, perhaps I should not be so surpirsed.

Nonetheless, I think whenever you launch a product, make sure that the features that it does have work well, you can always add more later.