Jeff Bezos is undoubtedly a talented businessman. He knew already when he started Amazon how to think. So there was a specific reason for him to start with books. And he also knew at the time that it was just a beginning. But here’s what he managed to miss anyway: an even more interesting case than books?
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he did so at a time when the internet was neither particularly well developed nor particularly good technically. Yet he started. Because he did an analysis that explained why and how he should start.
For a good reason Bezos landed in books.
What Bezos did was the following:
1. He knew Moore’s Law, knew that the internet, as well as the number of connections, and the quality in them, would only increase over time.
2. He analyzed basically all the “products” that were on our globe, then concluded that Books was the product category where there were the greatest number of titles on the whole planet.
Number two on his list was music – what also today has become a big digital, and global, business. Third I do not remember but think it was movies – also today a big digital, and global, business.
According to this search, there are about 130 million books on earth. And a streaming service of the type Spotify has perhaps between 50 and 100 million melodies nowadays.
Bezos thought in this, unusually smart, way when he started Amazon: it would be completely impossible to physically build a library that had exactly all the books on the globe. But; with the help of the internet, even then, even though it was not so well developed, such a library could be created.
That’s why he started with books.
It can be described as follows: it, already then, not so well-developed internet, was unusually useful for selling books.
And since then, both users and the internet have itself chewed on, with the help of Moore´s law, and he has gradually been able to expand Amazon’s store to today contain just about everything.
But now try this…
There are about 25,000 universities on the globe. How many exactly there are, no one knows. It might as well be 50,000. And what exactly is a university is hard to really know. There is no globally accepted system for this very thing.
Each university then has, perhaps, no one neither knows this exactly, about 3,000 courses. Some have more, others have fewer. But let’s say 3,000 apiece as an average.
This will in total be 75 million courses.
And then we haven’t even come close to trying to count the number of professional courses that can be found on the globe – not provided by universities.
Is it true that Bezos did the right analysis?
Suck perhaps on this…when you think a bit about the future of education.
Disruptive Education 