It’s a Jungle Out There

Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a Fortune 500 company. See if you can guess which one it is.

I’ll narrow it down for you - it’s an Internet company… a big one. The last time I checked (which was two minutes ago), it had over ten thousand employees. This company has incorporated pretty much every major piece of online functionality you can think of - search, blogs, photos, videos, music, tags, maps, wikis, message boards, social networks, online payments; you name it, the company probably has it in some shape or form. I think it’s pretty safe to say that this company is a web portal (even though not everyone sees it that way).

Oh yeah, and it’s not Google. It’s not Yahoo! either. It’s Amazon.

First, a history lesson…

Amazon started off with a simple concept- sell products online. Jeff Bezos made a list of the best products to sell through the web, and because of the massive numbers of titles in print, books came out on top. So they started with books first.

As Amazon grew, it rolled out features that were (initially) born out of necessity: because Amazon was selling so many products, it had to find a better way of filtering out products based on each shopper’s individual tastes. That’s where “people who purchased this also purchased…” came in. More recently, Amazon introduced new features that let customers upload their own images to product pages (comes in especially handy when shopping for a digital camera), discuss the product on its own forum, and append their own product information to a wiki on each page.

I do think Amazon’s done a phenomenal job with maintaining and organizing its content. However, at some point, all the features do start getting in the way. It’s inevitable. There are more and more “click to edit this!” links scattered all over the place and more product information despite the fact that we’re already overloaded with details and specifications. The overall shopping experience deteriorates.

Some of Amazon’s ventures seem iffy as well. The A9 search engine doesn’t appear to add any relevant value. I for one, don’t like the paid search ads that get embedded into Amazon’s search results:

“I don’t want to see ads from the web; I just want to find Amazon products, dammit.”

I suppose that somewhere along the way, Amazon began to represent more than just selling physical goods online - it became a symbol for all ‘online commerce’. This is so broad of a term that it can include generally anything, which makes it mean absolutely nothing. I’m not against Amazon… but I’m not in love with it either. I’m ambivalent toward it.

Simple is complex is simple is complex…

Nobody can really come along and out-Amazon Amazon… it’d be foolish to try. Sure you can build a clone of Amazon’s site with all of its features, but that would be like building a 80,000-seat football stadium in a town with a population of less than 100 - you just don’t have Amazon’s userbase and you don’t have its data… you can’t build a megastore anymore.

Yet, something disruptive happened in the last few years: blogging. Product-related blogs are becoming a decentralized version of the online-megastore. Think of product blogs as a glue for smaller niche stores. These blogs are a recommendation engine that’s not dictated by a math equation. To me, they feel more personal. I trust them. They’re simple too, a handful of new products to check out each day, along with a short description and (if available) a link to a store that carries it.

Now, these blogs are evolving too. Productdose is the perfect example. It started off as a simple wordpress-powered blog covering style, technology and design. Several months ago, the productdose team relaunched the site with the functionality to automatically pull prices for the products they blog about from affiliated retailers. As of just two days ago, they’ve added better filtering/community elements, including their own productwikis.

Will enough members actively use these new features to make them valuable to everyone else? Productdose only has a tiny fraction of the number of members Amazon does, but it could make up for it in a more loyal/enthusiastic core of followers with similar tastes. It’s something to keep an eye on.

John Maeda and Diego Rodriguez recently sat down for a fireside chat about the trend toward simplicity. Near the end, Diego asks John what’s next - where does the simplicity movement go from here? John’s response:

What’s next = the next chapter of simplicity. Watching things move over to the simplicity trend, and then start moving towards complexity when the time comes. And then back again later. And hopefully enjoying life along the way.