April, 2018: Quotes, Excerpts, Inspirations
Monthly collection of quotes, excerpts, and inspirations gathered from standout readings in the past month. As usual, I’ve sequenced them to have a narrative thread weaving in and out.
The full articles are great, so dive deeper at your leisure!
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“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before — in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.”
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon Blog, 2017 Letter to Shareholders
“The Echo Look won’t tell you why it’s making its decisions. And yet it purports to show us our ideal style, just as algorithms like Netflix recommendations, Spotify Discover, and Facebook and YouTube feeds promise us an ideal version of cultural consumption tailored to our personal desires. In fact, this promise is inherent in the technology itself: Algorithms, as I’ll loosely define them, are sets of equations that work through machine learning to customize the delivery of content to individuals, prioritizing what they think we want, and evolving over time based on what we engage with.”
- Kyle Chayka, Racked, Style Is an Algorithm
“When modes of tastes change, there is a certain fear: Am I in or out? Do I understand the new or am I stuck in the old? In 1980, the New Yorker published George W.S. Trow’s essay describing this feeling under the title of “Within the Context of No Context,” from which I took the epigraph and structure for this piece. Trow’s essay came out as a book in 1981 and again in 1997. In the appended introduction to the 1997 edition, he uses the phrase “collapsing dominant” to describe a situation in which an older, established mode of cultural authority, or a taste regime, is fading and being replaced by a newer one. These regimes have two parts: the subjects of taste and the way taste is communicated.”
- Kyle Chayka, Racked, Style Is an Algorithm
“Hype is never realistic, but it’s rarely empty. As an industry, we surely overestimated the impact bots would have. And we did a disservice by equating chatbot with messaging app: things get so much more interesting when we focus on the latter. I wouldn’t want to be raising money for a chatbot startup right now, but messaging isn’t going anywhere because conversation isn’t going anywhere. NLP and AI will continue to improve. Developers and platforms will continue to experiment with different flavors of conversational experience. And whether the hype cycle comes around again or not, it’s valuable to consider conversation, in all its forms, as part of the product toolkit.”
- Dave Feldman, Medium, Chatbots: What Happened?
“Retail has been in a constant state of renewal since the earliest days of commerce. Artisans were disrupted by merchants, who were disrupted by bazaars and spice-route traders. Pushcarts disrupted stand-alone stores. The Sears Roebuck catalog of 1893 disrupted the first era of brick-and-mortar retail. Malls disrupted the town square; superstores and category-killers disrupted the local five-and-dime. And now, off-price, dollar stores, fast-fashion and online players are shaking up the industry. Through it all, retail has survived. The disrupter du jour is, of course, Amazon — which collected more than 40 cents of every dollar spent online last year. Few retailers have figured out yet how to compete effectively with Amazon, but some perspective is necessary. Just 8.9 percent of retail sales in the United States last year were made online — including Amazon. Said differently, 91.1 percent of the $5.7 trillion consumers spent at retailers last year still passed through brick-and-mortar locations.”
- Joel Bines and David Bassuk, New York Times, Why We Should Be Optimistic About Retail
“The struggles of J.Crew, Gap, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel and many others go beyond the simple explanation that they missed the impact of technology or a specific trend. Instead, these merchandising-driven brands are caught in the middle of one of the most profound but little talked about shifts in the retail and apparel space: the shift from a supply-driven world to a demand-driven world, and the cultural change needed to thrive today… When industries are shifting, the reasoning lies not in the symptoms — certain brands struggling or trends evolving — but in the root causes — the shift from a supply-driven world to a demand-driven world. The decline of J.Crew and its ilk is not the result of any single leader, decision or trend. It’s because of a fundamental shift in the mechanics of commerce, arguably one of the most profound changes the industry has ever seen.”
- Richie Siegel, Loose Threads, Mickey Drexler and the death of a supply-driven world
“For the past decade we’ve invested in and celebrated companies through the lens of network effects, Amazon’s power in retail, and measuring the potential of a brand by its scale and path to category dominance. We assumed that antiquated monolithic brands would be attacked by new modern brands that take over consumer consciousness enmasse. But instead, old and big brands are fighting against thousands of tiny brands with low overhead, high on design merchandise, and supremely efficient customer acquisition tactics. Many of us failed to recognize the collective impact of the long-tail of micro brands.”
- Scott Belsky, Medium, Attack Of The Micro Brands
“Normally, companies ring bells. Normally, companies spend their day doing interviews on the trading floor touting why their stock is a good investment. Normally, companies don’t pursue a direct listing. While I appreciate that this path makes sense for most, Spotify has never been a normal kind of company. As I mentioned during our Investor Day, our focus isn’t on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we stumble. The constant is that we believe we are still early in our journey and we have room to learn and grow.”
- Daniel Ek, Spotify Newsroom, Spotify lists on NYSE as SPOT
