How Amazon Turned Their Services into a Platform
The Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation website posted an article which noted that it is not safe to rely on only excellent service to sustain your competitive advantage as a services provider because competitors will learn from you. A more robust approach is to turn your service into a platform for others to build on. Amazon is a great example of a services provider that has truly innovated its offerings. It started as a book store but its business activities today involve selling an increasingly wide variety of items, even to the point of reselling its own capabilities as an online retailer, using its Web sites and servers as platforms. Amazon was quick to figure out ways to let its customers co-create with them. Amazon also decided to open up its powerful online reselling Web site to other merchants for them to list their own merchandise.
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