> New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies.
Oohh, this very much.
Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next.
For two years, my job was to make the UX of that application a little bit faster. Not the order to pick the items (another team) not the decision of which shipments should be processed next (also different team) or which items should be picked by which picker (you guessed it- a different team). Just the UX for the 0.9MP of screen space in front of the user.
Labour costs for that job are in the hundreds of millions per year, so any team that made a 1% improvement to overall efficiency would be covering its own costs a many times over. And we did.
Amazon can afford to get those small 1% gains multiple times per year, but for smaller companies the gains wouldn't pay for the costs. If they want to beat Amazon, they'll need to find a very big win that Amazon didn't see first. The only company I can think of that did that was Kiva Robotics- wait, it's called Amazon Robotics now.
Oohh, this very much.
Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next.
For two years, my job was to make the UX of that application a little bit faster. Not the order to pick the items (another team) not the decision of which shipments should be processed next (also different team) or which items should be picked by which picker (you guessed it- a different team). Just the UX for the 0.9MP of screen space in front of the user.
Labour costs for that job are in the hundreds of millions per year, so any team that made a 1% improvement to overall efficiency would be covering its own costs a many times over. And we did.
Amazon can afford to get those small 1% gains multiple times per year, but for smaller companies the gains wouldn't pay for the costs. If they want to beat Amazon, they'll need to find a very big win that Amazon didn't see first. The only company I can think of that did that was Kiva Robotics- wait, it's called Amazon Robotics now.