Wardley Maps is Simon Wardley's Medium series on mapping business strategy and situational awareness, posted as a book in progress.
Commenters recommend it as the source for learning Wardley Mapping and say it helps entrepreneurs understand how technologies and platforms evolve.
AD: Its one of those areas I don't see come up AT ALL on HN, complexity theory [0] imho is a superset to all software engineering practises, because people are involved and not just because the things we are trying to solve are 'complex'.
A great place to start is Dave Snowden's Cynefin sense-making framework [1][2]. Study it and embed it into your core thinking, it can underpin how you approach almost every problem you come across in life. I was fortunate enough to attend a masterclass with Dave Snowden and Simon Wardley (Wardley maps, another thing worth understanding and practising related to strategy, he's published the whole thing for free on Medium [3]). What was fascinating and part of the result of the 2 day class is that Simon Wardley had been using a Cynefin like model in his head whilst making decisions and when he came up with his mapping method, additionally they had both been inspired by Max Boisot [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory_and_organizations
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework
[2] http://cognitive-edge.com/videos/cynefin-framework-introduction/
[3] https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Space_(conceptual_framework)
On one hand, as Amazon opens up the pieces that comprise its architecture, they begin to compete for external customers. On the other hand, Amazon itself keeps using its own solutions.
By the way, it’s not just that Amazon prevents its divisions from becoming ‘fat and inefficient’ by opening them up to external competition. Crucially, thanks to commoditising early and getting tons of companies to use its platform, Amazon can now see how others innovate on top of it (having low-level access to consumption information) and quickly follow on anything new, basically innovating but without risky R&D of their own[0].
[0] Simon Wardley wrote about Innovate—Leverage—Commoditise (ILC) approach here: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/03/understanding-ecosystems-part-i-of-ii.html
I’d also recommend his book (https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec) and the intro to value-chain mapping (http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/an-introduction-to-wardley-value-chain.html). It’s not about Amazon per se, but it helped me personally understand the strategy.
Simon Wardley has continued to evolve and refine the insights that led him to conceiving Zimki, and it is well worth any tech entrepreneur's time to take a look at the current iteration of "Wardley Mapping" to better understand how technologies (and platforms) evolve:
https://learnwardleymapping.com/book/
If Blank and Ries transformed our understanding of startup tactics, Wardley is improving our understanding of strategy.
Simon's account of the Zimki episode is in Chapter 5, if you just want a bit more detail: https://medium.com/wardleymaps/the-play-and-a-decision-to-act-8eb796b1dff1
I’ve been sporadically working on this over the last couple of weeks, and I think it’s now stable enough to get other people’s feedback on it. I got the idea while perusing Simon Wardley’s mapping book-in-progress (https://medium.com/wardleymaps), and I wondered whether I can bundle all the chapters into a decent-looking PDF. (It works pretty well for that purpose). I also wanted it to be a sample app for gluing things together for the purpose of producing books in the browser.
I’d love it if you gave it a spin; please let me know if you find anything nasty!
Serverless (as far as I can understand) is what we can consider as the early stages of the commoditization of compute.
Meaning, similar to electricity or tap water, at some point in our lives we will subscribe to a provider and then just plug and play whatever we want to. It is just we are in the early stages.
If you are interested in these kind of stuff, maybe take a look at Wardley Maps:
https://medium.com/wardleymaps
Great to see Wardley Mapping used as a tool for developing situational awareness.
Here's a video of Simon Wardley introducing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW9L1uNMCs
And for all the details here's a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Wardley-Mapping-Knowledge-Topographical-intelligence-ebook/dp/B08LTM3VFX
And book free online:
https://medium.com/wardleymaps