Learning from others

I recently added a guy called Bob Parsons to my blogroll - he is the CEO of GoDaddy - a leading player in the provision of very cheap domain name registeration (I have used them a number of times in the past). He is an outspoken kind of CEO - which makes his blog interesting to read :-)

In this post http://tinyurl.com/bvemx he speaks about the founder of Sony and makes the following very interesting statement (i tinied the url as the orginal is very long)

It’s best to solve your own problems.
Like Mr. Ibuka, I firmly believe that it is always best to solve your own business problems. In fact, I have never, and will never, allow my employees to visit another company to see how they are handling a particular solution. I know that if I let my employees look to other companies – particularly competitors -- for solutions and ideas, that whatever solution they decide upon will be mediocre at best.

Which is something to be honest that would never have occured to me in the Web2 space - where each early developer of services seems to add something new to the community learning experience and where you have everyones experiments being watched closely and commented upon. For example the following is taken from an Adaptive Path interview with Eric Costello from Flickr - found at http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php

EC: Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.

For me this seems a lot more natural than Bob's approach. Yet his business is very successful in their space.  Each to their own I guess!

keith

UPDATE - replayed the tinied URL as the original linked to the trackback for that post :-(

Comments

[Ken]

Nice blogging Keith, funny you mention Bob Parsons, have been following his own blog for the past few weeks, there are some interesting insights to be had. A bit of an arrogant and aggressive character, but hey, his model works and he's peaked 1/3 of all domain registrations in the world - never mind his additional services.

Not sure if you do or not, but the podcasts of Radio GoDaddy are a good source of his own views, fielding public calls in relation to his blog and more... well worth a listen!

[keith bohanna]

Thanks for that Ken - just had a look at RadioGoDaddy - he certainly is out there with his thoughts and views!

keith