Thread by @swardley

"Nobody gets a seven-year head start, and so that was unbelievable" - hbr.org/amp/2020/12/ho… ... it's not really unbelievable if you consider inertia and looked at the executives of competitors at that time i.e. IBM, Oracle, HP etc. They were all out of their depth.

What is unbelievable is that despite doing this once, despite the play being obvious (i.e. the ILC like model - trying reading AWS book on reaching cloud velocity) that AWS gets to do it all over again with serverless and competitors still react as hopelessly as the past ...

... I don't know what garbage they spoon feed these executives at business schools but it isn't working. Oh, and Lambda launched almost 7 years ago. Ok, MSFT is in there whilst Google has fumbled and gone off down a K8s dead end. The rest of the industry? ROTFLMAO.

That'll be twice now ... I can only assume this pattern is going to just get repeated as we move further up the stack?

X : What can competitors do?
Me : At a minimum start with doctrine. My recommendation however would be to build a time machine and start with doctrine about 13 years ago.

I'll use the new doctrine table, phase I at the bottom ... build up!

X : 13 years?
Me : Well, 15 years would be better. I thought I'd give a couple of years for inertia etc. But really, you should have been doing most of this stuff long ago. This is 2021. This was late in 2011.

X : Don't you think kubernetes will challenge AWS?
Me : Ignoring that EKS is probably the most widely used kubernetes service and we haven't even started with EKS anywhere ... my answer to the question would be ... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ouch my sides have split. Please no more.

X : Do you think Amazon should be split up?
Me : It depends upon your purpose? If you intend to accelerate China's dominance on the world stage whilst allowing some execs to keep rent extracting until retirement without fear of being commoditised then by all means.

X : Well, how do we compete with AWS?
Me : I've already answered. Focus on doctrine (see table).
X : What about strategy?
Me : Forget it. Focus on doctrine first ... start with phase I, climb up the table. Toughen up a bit. Strategy comes much later.
X : Culture?
Me : Doctrine.

X : What if we change our organisation model?
Me : Doctrine.
X : But you talk about Pioneer - Settler - Town Planner.
Me : Sure ... but after you've sorted doctrine. Or hire someone like @jamesaduncan who has the experience to play with the order of stuff.

X : I thought you were against hiring management consultants?
Me : There are exceptions. Anyway, I was more thinking you need a new CEO. Actually, that's a good rule of thumb. If the consultant you're hiring couldn't do a better job than your CEO then ... don't hire them.

X : But strategy is important.
Me : Of course. However, until you're good at all the stuff in the green box ... don't waste time with strategy and ideas of exploiting the landscape or organisation models like PST. The only strategy you need is to "get yourself shipshape".