Amazon just announced the launch of Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF). An API that allows anyone to use their services to manage distributed workflow between applications & services….

The main question, if you are a business manager is: "Why should I give a damn?"

The answer is: because it is a perfect illustration of what the API model can bring to a business if you understand and accept it.

What just happened is that you can now build "amazon quality level" applications relying on Amazon infrastructure, entirely at variable costs, and delegate to AWS the tedious, costly, and complicated tasks.

Setting-up and most importantly, making work any workflows based service is one of the most complicated challenges when building professional task management software, and it requires special skills in hosting, infrastructure management, error handling, communications, etc... And if you want to send a task from one service to another, it gets worse.

So if I am a startup with a cool idea (ie. A freemium approval process manager, having a document circulate for approval between several persons not on the same building, company and timezone) I'll spend a lot of resources on trying to build a robust hosting and workflow management system. If I have 50K€ to build my prototype or beta, I will spend at least half of it on solving tricky timeout, errors, hosting & pinging problems... and probably fail somewhat.

But my first customer might want something that works on a "mission critical" level before using it, not something mostly working. So they will say "good potential, but not reliable enough", and even with the best design and user experience, we know how this ends.  No one needs an almost working product.

Using SWF's API, I can focus on my front end user experience, have my php or ruby junior buddy developer develop it, and not care or be encumbered with the "big IT" problems. Amazon already solved these, and I can access it, use it, embed it. Chances are I'll get to market faster, and have a much more robust beta on the market. This is a huge competitive advantage. My resources will be focused and spent on my core. And at project start stage, this is critical.This is the type of API that can allow quick and robust prototyping. We should know, understand and adopt it. When discussing a project or a new product, let's keep that in mind. Using API's instead of proprietary developments is the "startup way", and how we can gain speed, agility, traction and efficiency in new products development implementation.

This is how digital natives think : "Api-ify" to other expert services, collaborate with someone doing something very well, not code propriety (and burden, and costs). Win on your core competency, fast and focused.

As a business owner, of course, you have to trust Amazon. Should you?

I believe so, but will tell you why, and much more on this a bit later.

That Amazon.com is more and more becoming a platform goes unchallenged. Yet this strategy remains largely emerging and quite difficult to measure given the few metrics the company disclose. A very convincing analysis of its 2011 Q4 results by ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo makes some very good points and clearly demonstrates the depth of this transition.

Even though Amazon.com's results missed analysts' revenues expectation by $1 bn, it beat their profit estimates by $100 m. Scot Wingo argues that sales from third party sellers cannibalized Amazon.com's own sales, but contributed to the increase in profit because costs are far lower on those sales. To sum up, the company is moving away from a retailer model (where its revenues are equals to the transaction values) to a marketplace model (where its revenues are commission on transaction values).

• The company also disclosed it had two million such sellers, representing 36% of units sold (an increase of 65%). This shows the level of momentum Amazon.com is able to sustain.
• Services like FBA, AWS, MechanicalTurk are slowly maturing. The company announced a new metric called "Service Sales" encompassing all those services, and disclosed it had been growing by 74% year over year.
• Purely digital offers (Amazon App Store for Android, Kindle Direct Publishing) are basically a platform model on steroids.

In a recent article, Chris Dixon explained why he thinks two models are currently competing: Amazon.com is heralding the centralized e-commerce approach, while eBay's strategy clearly supports a decentralized paradigm.

• Contrary to eBay, Amazon.com always maintain its control over the customer accounts, and often competes directly with its third-party sellers.
• The leading e-retailer provides an end-to-end solution which ensures a great customer experience for the buyer. Through its multiple acquisition, eBay built a basket of services that are well segmented but less integrated. Most of those products kept their own brands (cf. PayPal, Magento, Hunch, GSI Commerce).
• eBay does not keep any inventory. Amazon.com's numerous fulfillment centers and facilities can be considered one of the company's most impressive assets. Being able to provide such a strong link between the physical and the digital world is definitely a key offer to help other companies transition to the web.

Centralize vs. decentralized e-commerce

From the 19th century word referring to a freak in circus side-shows (in some cases, the performance included biting the head off a live chicken), to the 1990's pejorative term of a nerdy technologist, the word "geek" keeps evolving.

A few days ago, a bunch of parisian faberNovelians were featured in a long article of Le Figaro Magazine as ultimate "geeks" (read: "narcissistic representatives of generation Y, overconfident and ultra-connected").

This specific use of the word reveals a shift: now that technology is making it to the masses, now that it is becoming mainstream and such a huge part of our daily lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, an entire generation can be considered as geek. What used to be a pejorative term for marginals is now applied to the entire cohort of "digital natives". The word doesn't make anymore sense in the meaning we are used to give it.

Hence the question: what does "geek" mean in 2012?

I personally have no answer to that question, so I went asking around what other faberNovelians thought. Here are a few answers from our team :

Arnaud M.: "iIt is someone who fiddles about, who diverts an object from its primary use."

Solène M.: "A geek is someone who would never answer that question."

Xavier M.: "geek is the new glam."

Maxime C.: "Today, the best way to define what is a geek, is to send pictures of geeks."

Marguerite M.: "There is always geekier than one's self (the second floor - Applidium), or less geek than one's self (my grandmother)."

John G.: "My own take on the word "geek" in the U.S. is that it has gone out of fashion.  Nobody in tech thinks of themselves as geeks anymore, even if they're linux programmers.  Tech is too mainstream."

Julian N.: "Geek means becoming contextually aware of more things than you ever imagined possibly due largely, but not solely, to technology."

Clearly "geek" has transcended its circus origins, and even its more recent negative connotations.  But can anyone agree on what it means today?

What's your take?  What does "Geek" mean to you today?

Do you own retail storefronts, big or small?  Do you look at the web and wonder if it's going to eat your company alive in one year, five years, ten years?    Well here are two simple questions you can ask yourself to determine whether your storefront is safe against the onslaught of web disruption:

1) Is your storefront significantly more convenient to customers than the web?

2) Do you sell a good/service that can't be sold via the web?

If you answered yes to either or both of these things, you're safe from web disruption.  For now.

If not (and most storefronts would answer no to both of these questions), you are directly in the path of the web's disruption of retail.  

Here are some examples of stores that are safe and stores that are not safe:

My corner store sells butter, orange juice and toilet paper, three things everyone in my neighborhood needs and runs out of constantly.  When we run out of these things, we need them NOW - we can't wait for the online service to show up with its truck and deliver.  It is safe from web disruption for now.

The cafe down the street sells coffee, which I need several times a day.  I can't get it on the web.  (Not yet at least - next year, who knows?)  What's more, it is nearby and I enjoy walking to get it.  It is safe from web disruption for now.

The shoe store on Broadway?  It sells shoes that I can get on the web more easily than by walking to the store.  Its selection is smaller.  And try as I might, I can't even remember the name of the store!  I CAN remember the brand of shoe I want - which I can easily look up on the web.  It is not safe from web disruption.  

The big electronics store on Union Square?  I go into it and decide what electronics I want, then buy them for less online. It is not safe from web disruption.

So then what do you do if you're sitting directly in the path of web disruption, like Dorothy's house in the Wizard of Oz?  

Well, it turns out that (thankfully) there is a third question you can ask yourself, which can save you from web disruption.  And this one you have the power to determine the answer to yourself.  It is this:

3) Are you a company that co-exists equally in physical space and on the web?  Does your storefront operation tie in seamlessly to an online experience, allowing in-store visitors to become online buyers of products (and services!) now and at any time in the future? 

If your answer to that third question is "yes", then congratulations - you are positioned to move forward into the new age of storefront retail.  

In the new age of retail, the successful storefront is an extension of the online store.  The two are not separate, but continuous.  The physical reinforces the virtual, and the virtual reinforces the physical.  A customer who leaves the store without buying something isn't a loss to the business - they are simply a customer who will continue their experience online, and develop a closer relationship with the company.  A customer who starts their buying process on the web may decide to go to the storefront to finish it, pre-armed with knowledge of what they want.

The two together add up to more than the sum of their parts.  

The disruption of the web is continually accelerating, but as a retailer you don't have to lose from it.  You can instead join it and win.