Founder of one of the most successful e-tailers, Amazon.com, and the passionate inventor of Kindle, Jeff Bezos has spent some serious time thinking about ideas and their distribution through content development. So how does that play out in his everyday business strategy?
“We base our strategy on customer needs instead of what our skills are,” Bezos told CNET last year, speaking with Dan Farber, Editor of CBS Interactive NEWS. “Customers will eventually need things that you don’t have skills for, so (you) need to renew yourself with new skill.”
Matching content needs with skills
Dan Farber got this from the interview:
Regarding the fate of physical books, Bezos said the vast majority of books will be read electronically. Just as horses haven’t gone away, books will be around, he quipped. “We see Kindle as an effort to improve the book, even though it hasn’t changed in 500 years.”
The sifting and judgment of editors and the “worthy researcher” of content is removed—allowing the person seeking knowledge to directly interact with all the grit, grist and grind of information in raw and ugly form.
Content development in 2010—mastering the immediate
There are still knowledge aggregators you can rely on for quick content to develop a story—Gartner, Forrester, and The New York Times all come to mind. These outlets are under pressure though.
Jean Avent, Vice President of Communications atWrite2Market, relates, “BusinessWeek laid off 130 people in late 2009. AP has laid off 90. Forbes has cut 100 out of 200. People need to understand that these well-groomed stands of educated writers don’t exist like they used to just a few years ago.”
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