Amazon and Twitter are both successful companies that evolved from very humble beginnings.<\/p>\n
One started as an online bookshop, while the other was a \"microblogging\" service that limited posts to 140 characters.<\/p>\n
Although they hardly overlap in functionality, they each followed one common rule to grow and eventually dominate their worlds: Gall's Law.<\/p>\n
The law comes from US author Robert Gall, who wrote a book called \"General Systemantics\" in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
The idea is that a good complex system always originates from a foolproof smaller system.<\/p>\n
\"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked, reads the often-quoted passage.<\/p>\n
\"A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.\"<\/p>\n
Both Amazon and Twitter followed this philosophy to stop their systems from getting bloated with annoying features. They added new functionality as they witnessed customer behaviours.<\/p>\n
Twitter, when it started in 2006, only allowed users to publish posts of maximum 140 characters nothing more, nothing less.<\/p>\n
It had no retweet, reply or hashtagging functions.<\/p>\n
According to a CBInsights report, it was only after users tried to mimic retweeting and replying within the constraints of the system when the company introduced them as functionality.<\/p>\n
\"As co-founder Evan Williams put it, it wasnt even clear 'what [Twitter] was' in those early days, and the product took several turns before settling on what it is now,\" stated CBInsights in its report.<\/p>\n
It wouldn't have been far-fetched for Twitter to have thought users might want sharing and replying.<\/p>\n
\"But cultivating an openness to what users actually did, rather than assuming they knew exactly what to build, was key to how Twitter developed into the product it would become.\"<\/p>\n
So what happens if you try to put in all the bells and whistles too quickly?<\/p>\n
ICQ is what you have.<\/p>\n
Older folks would remember ICQ in the 1990s as the first messaging and arguably a social media product that found mainstream fame.<\/p>\n
The software caught fire with the public late last century and boasted more than 100 million accounts at its peak in 2001, according to CBInsights, during a time when not everyone had home internet access.<\/p>\n
Then it all went downhill.<\/p>\n
\"ICQ started branching out from its core utility by adding features around shopping, music, games, and even careers resulting in a busy interface that felt removed from the purpose of the product,\" stated the CBInsights report.<\/p>\n
Just a few years later, Facebook took its place in the zeitgeist where ordinary people connected online.<\/p>\n
Dropbox co-founder and chief Drew Houston gave his take in 2010 while answering a question on Quora.<\/p>\n
\"ICQ became so comically bloated that they released an 'ICQ Lite' version, but by then they were already on the decline,\" he said.<\/p>\n
\"In fact, feature bloat is how most consumer web and desktop products suffocate themselves: portals (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc), social networks aside from Facebook (Friendster, MySpace), file sharing (Kazaa vs Kazaa Lite) and media players (Winamp).\"<\/p>\n
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The rule that took Amazon and Twitter from startups to mega businesses - Yahoo Finance Australia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon and Twitter are both successful companies that evolved from very humble beginnings. One started as an online bookshop, while the other was a \"microblogging\" service that limited posts to 140 characters. Continue reading