Ancient Wisdom for Modern Success

Nicholas Carr says if Machiavelli had Internet access, he totally would have blogged.

Wired Magazine reports that the ancient Indian art of vastu shastra is the key to immediate website traffic growth. (The article isn't online yet, but there's an excellent summary here.) The folks over at Slashdot are skeptical, but Wired quotes vastu-expert Smita Narang (whose website has lots of CSS warnings and errors) that 3 out of 4 sites she redesigned became more popular.

I've been reading Swiss scholar Harro von Senger's book on the 36 ancient Chinese military Strategems. And I just realized that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos might be an expert.

For instance, there was a brief discussion on S3/EC2 during a recent ISPCON session. None of the 4 prominent web hosting execs on the panel saw Amazon as a serious threat, despite the ongoing media attention it's received and its growing list of users. EC2 is still in limited beta after all, and Amazon's investors don't seem keen on additional technology investments.

Could Bezos be using a combination of stratagems #1 ("deceive the sky to cross the sea") and #34 ("self-inflicted injury") to divert established hosting players' attention?

And earlier today, someone commented on David Berlind's ZDNet blog that EC2 sounds fabulous, but Amazon can't possibly cover its costs by charging $0.10 per server instance per hour. David had calculated that he could reduce the hosting fees for his event production business from $8400 to $1752 if he switched to Amazon.

Could this be a case of stratagem #17 ("hold out a brick to attract a gem")? If enough 2-server customers like David move to EC2, Bezos will eliminate his #1 expense - which he says isn't technology or people or inventory, but non-utilization of existing resources.

Last but not least, Misha Govshteyn from AlertLogic complained on my other blog that EC2 seems nebulous. What does Amazon's claim of scalability really mean? No specific details are provided on its infrastructure.

This sounds like a variation on stratagem #32 ("the empty fort"). It originated from a  (possibly fictitious) Chinese general who sat calmly on the gates and played the zither while his city was being attacked, leaving  enemy troops to assume that he has substantial military power at his disposal. The general actually had nothing in his arsenal, which certainly isn't the case for Amazon. But "infinite scalability" sounds much more impressive than a long list of specs, no?

Comments

[Cherok]

Thank you, Isabel, this article was a great help in my Vastu studies. Especially the Vastu-Webdesign-joke (or not?) brings up the question, where the limits of traditional principles are. Exciting problem :)