Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that belonged to Canon
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https://learnwardleymapping.com/book/
If Blank and Ries transformed our understanding of startup tactics, Wardley is improving our understanding of strategy.
Simon's account of the Zimki episode is in Chapter 5, if you just want a bit more detail: https://medium.com/wardleymaps/the-play-and-a-decision-to-ac...
I'm just a bit weary of people claiming they "invented the future" way back before the future actually came.
As far as learning from Zimki, I think the lesson Simon says he learned was basically (paraphrasing) "make sure you don't run out of political capital" and watching out for misaligned incentives.
I was at the 2007 OSCON where Simon Wardley resigned on-stage after Canon changed their mind on open sourcing it. That was quite a moment!
Amazingly powerful moment because everyone there empathised with the experience of being on the right technical track to do something amazing but management not getting it. His frustration was under control, but palpable. And ("anticlimactic" reply in this thread notwithstanding) it was clear we were witnessing something we weren't going to see again.
[edit: also one of the best technical interviews I had. They sat me down with a Mac and a list of stuff to do and left me alone for, I think, an hour to work through them as best I could. No restrictions on looking stuff up, no gotcha questions, no algorithm implementations, etc.]
There were lots of examples of companies doing things Zimki did, most WebObjects projects felt that way IMO.
There are dozens of examples of people being first to market and not winning (Canon). As so, what's so interesting about this article?
- Facebook won, when MySpace and others were first to market
- Google won, and it was crazy late to market over Yahoo/Altavista/Excite.
- Starbucks won, when plenty of other national coffee chains existed
etc
I can't think of any. First to market isn't the advantage that people think it is. It might be more important for smaller markets, perhaps.
It's hard to exactly define "first to market." Was Google first to market because they were the first to have a search engine that functioned in the way theirs did, and should we put more primitive search engines in the same category?
Was Dropbox first to market? Did they win the market?
It often feels like a company is first to market, and then they win that market... and then maybe five or ten years later, an innovation comes along from a new company and they lose the market. That's just the way the market is supposed to work, and natural, but there's still an advantage to being first to market in having those years of market dominance.
Not sure if Netflix was first to DVD by mail, quite possibly; they were early, and I don't know if VHS rental by mail was ever a thing.
Uber may have been the first to internet hail livery vehicles, but Sidecar was the first to do internet ridesharing as an app, and Lyft was the first to call unlicensed taxi service ridesharing. Uber is winning in the marketplace at the moment though and Sidecar is dead; of course, winning in this market still means burning money.
Amazon was early to selling books on the web, but e-commerce catalog sales were available on pre-Internet information services. AWS defined a new category of managed hosting, but lots of other companies did similar things before.
I think BillPoint may have slightly predated PayPal. Being early here seems to have had staying power, as Yahoo's PayDirect didn't do well enough to stick around. Otoh, Venmo was good enough to buy, Zelle seems popular, and other easy credit card processors like Square and such seem to be winning over that side of PayPal's market. There's a moat, but it's not very deep.
> Was Dropbox first to market? Did they win the market?
No, there was XDrive and Yahoo Briefcase and probably more that launched and shutdown before Dropbox. Not sure if Dropbox won, OneDrive and Google Drive are contenders still.
... and Verizon, and a few others.
Though maybe Intel didn't intended 8008/8080 is used for personal computer.
Example: ebay
Counterexample: Flight booking
You could also characterize this as "innovative startup strangled by acquiring behemoth or clueless greedy investors" which brings to mind a different set of examples, but that's not much more interesting.
What makes Zimki interesting IMO is that Simon Wardley successfully "timed the market" of technological change, clearly explained his thinking, and has since applied the same logic to make other correct predictions (or give good strategic advice).
Has Wardley mentioned why they didn't pursue the start-up route (like Eric Yuan at zoom.us did; or Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes at SnowflakeDB did, to give recent examples)?
I always assumed that restrictive non-competes prevented moving quickly, and that Google's launch of AppEngine then sucked the oxygen from the room.
Facebook had a valuable userbase and a polished product (it looked good, no templates and music on auto-play)
> Google won, and it was crazy late to market over Yahoo/Altavista/Excite.
Google had a better product, plain simple.
> Starbucks won, when plenty of other national coffee chains existed
Starbucks won partly because it had "Italian coffee". Nobody else had espresso machines in as many locations as they did.
Yes exactly. Here in Melbourne (where we have a culture of European style espresso everywhere), Starbucks has barely been able to get a foothold in the market.
I always felt their coffee sucked, but their employees have always been nice, and friendly.
I enjoyed getting out, people watching, and feeling zero pressure to buy anything, or leave.
(I've noticed slight changes, like codes to the bathroom, but it's still my favorite place to hang. American perspective.)
Most independents will be better, if there is any around.