Non-Geeks Beware
The title of this post comes from the end of Hank William’s long discourse on the state of tech companies today. I bolded one particular sentence way down at the bottom:
“Companies not lead by geeks in tech driven marketplaces will fail.”
I’d expand that to most industries, not just tech concerns. Every company could use a hard core geek at the top.
Being a geek means that you like to tinker with things. Tinkering produces data and new ideas. Those elements form the basis of more experiments and eventually you hit on something new and powerful.
No matter what business you’re in, embrace the data. Companies that fail to tinker die. (maybe not today, but eventually)
Why Are So Many Seemingly Great Companies Failing?:
By most accounts, eBay is in big trouble. Why? Because their technology has lagged woefully, while Amazon, a true geekocracy, is about to eat their lunch. Amazon understands that they are not a retailer, or a marketplace. They are a platform. They figure out how to connect buyers to products in the most efficient way possible. That means putting products in front of people in the optimal manner. It means creating technology that maximizes transactions. These are hard problems. It also means creating systems that allow others to do the same thing while taking ever smaller pieces of the transaction, but for massively larger numbers of transactions.
Amazon sees itself as the ultimate Internet transaction system. And they are winning. The reason for this is Jeff Bezos and his team had the vision and they realized that they needed to have serious computer scientists working on the really hard problems associated with Internet transactions.
Meg Whitman never understood that that could or should be eBay’s role. This is because non-geeks running public companies generally can’t see beyond next quarter. Google is to Yahoo as Amazon is to eBay. Eventually both Yahoo and eBay will shrink to total irrelevancy because they could not create successful *platforms*, whereas their competitors did.
The bottom line is we are now in the age of the geek. Non-geeks don’t realize this – because they are not geeks, and so they resent it. And they can’t smell the CO. Too bad. Companies not lead by geeks in tech driven marketplaces will fail. What we are seeing now is a radical clarification of what kind of organizational DNA leads to tech success.
[Via: Why does everything suck?]
