Amazon has long been held up as the best of E-commerce 1.0, and has powered the growth of Amazon from the laughing stock of bookstores (“Who can sell books without REAL bookstores?”) to an extended platform for e-commerce – selling nearly everything except houses, cars and people, to the infrastructure of many web 2.0 startups, and even into becoming the infrastructure of corporate america via Amazon’s Elastic Computing offering (EC2), or the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) (and related offerings) that make up Amazon Web Services.

One of the interesting ironies of Amazon, however, is the near non-existence of traditional “customer service.” Frankly, that’s because for the most part, there is no need to interact with the people behind the scenes at Amazon. When you’re buying through Amazon, you are buying the customer experience, streamlined order processing, and ability to find darn near anything that can be bought online, along with all the recommended items that “others like you” have bought.

So why buy Zappos?

Zappos has been selling through Amazon for some time now, and many of the brands that Zappos sold could also be bought through Amazon.

Perhaps this ~8 minute clip from Jeff Bezos (CEO/Founder of Amazon) to the employees of Zappos, will help.

Next Gen Customer Service

As some have put it already, the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon really brings to Amazon a “next generation customer service capability.” While Bezos claims to be “customer obsessed” (and as a long-time customer, and purchaser of quite a bit of products and services from or through Amazon, I do agree), Zappos really does embody going well above and beyond customer service, as anyone who has purchased from Zappos already knows.

Will the combined innovations of Amazon and Zappos work? Is 1 + 1 = 3++?

Amazon clearly has the technology and logistics capabilities that most companies would kill for, and Zappos provides the “over the top” human-side of the customer experience, together with a deep understanding and use of social media (primarily Twitter).

No doubt there will be hurdles to overcome, although some of the traditional issues of acquisitions are being sidestepped as Zappos will remain it’s own “wholly-owned” brand.

Given the speed with which Zappos has tended to react and improve, versus the longer-cycle of testing/innovation/improvement that Amazon has typically shown, it will be interesting to see how the combined operations work together.

What are your predictions for this acquisition? And what can you learn from the strengths of the respective companies, applied to your own?

Today, in perusing The New York Times Business Section, I was again pleasantly impressed with the degree to which ECM makes business news. On page one (continued on pages 3 and 7) for example, the Times reports that Google is getting into the e-books business with a mission to take on Amazon and Kindle.

On page 4, The Times covers Google Wave, a “latest” Enterprise 2.0 application. (OK the Times may over state the value of Google Wave (see Dan’s commentary at IAM Alert: The Whimpering Google Wave), but ECM is nonetheless being covered in this reputable high profile business periodical. On the same page, Plastic Logic, a Kindle rival is also introduced, and e-heath records are positioned as a clear technology winner in the government’s economic stimulus package.

Page 5, covers the Hearst Magazine‘s strategy for successfully balancing paper-based and web-based magazine publishing.

Page 6 includes an article about an author who used Twitter to test works in progress. Based on collaborative feed back the very first sentence of a novel was changed – amongst other edits. The eventual publication, was then specifically formatted for publishing on Kindle.

WOW – that’s a lot of ink in one Business section devoted to ECM.  OK, maybe the articles do not directly draw the correlation to ECM, but the topics they discuss: e-publishing, dynamic content delivery, e-ink, digital paper, online collaboration – are topics ECM veterans such as myself are well familiar with, and have been heralding the power of for many years. With the broader business community now catching up, this should spell a bright future for ECM practitioners. Business executives hopefully will now better understand these concepts, and want to further explore the powers and capabilities of ECM technologies within their domain, to drive new business models, increase innovation, streamline costs and processes, increase effective communication…

As I said in the last blog post, “this glimpse into what ECM can/will be is nothing short of amazing. I dare anyone to view this and tell me that we are not experiencing “the best of times.” Indeed, to further quote Dickens, “we had
everything before us…”

But only those that “get it” will be able to leverage these capabilities before they morph from competitive advantage to simply a cost of doing business. Building such strategies is what we at Information Architected do with a passion – simply because it is so powerful and fun.