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Missing the point of business models
Mar 23, 2007
Funny post over at O'Reilly about the success of Google, Southwest, Vanguard, and other customer-focused firms. Their secret? From Innovation in Business Models:
[M]any companies have come to dominate their space simply by reworking the way they make money. Doing this usually requires a fair amount of systems engineering to ensure that the company and its partners are set-up to make money in this new way.
Ask an engineer, get an engineer's answer. It's telling that the article never mentions customers, or a customer-centered attitude shared passionately by top leadership. This is the true driver of many success stories today - including Southwest and Google.
Yes, making a company customer-centered can require some major technology changes. But those are effects of the real cause, which is to meet customers' key unmet needs. The companies that do this will (continue to) lead their industries for the foreseeable future.
