An interesting article on how Open services like Amazon's or Google's are slowly taking off. The important insight is:
"Organizations shifting to a open service platform model have clear goals. First, they hope to encourage incremental innovation that adds value to their core offering or core service using the resources of others. It's also a realization that most of the good ideas in the world don't come from your own staff. While you might very well have lots of smart people in your organization, they are also aware of and sensitive to the inevitable organizational constraints that tend to restrain innovation. "
The article talks about possible applications in the financial industry. Easy bill handling comes to mind. Be sure to build it in a simple way, not forcefully limiting how and who can use it and you might watch how others leverage your work to industries and applications you wouldn't have paid attention to. Paypal learned this and already eclipses American Express in online transactions.
(Via Ben Hyde)
Posted by seefeld at August 3, 2003 19:19AFAIK Paypal doesn't exactly have a good reputation everywhere though...
Posted by: Michel Dänzer at August 4, 2003 02:36 PMThis is true, and for non-US users the signup procedure is really tedious.
One could say, that their success despite these shortcomings underlines the huge market opportunities for such services if well done.
Posted by: Bernhard Seefeld at August 4, 2003 02:40 PM