If it is possible for a $38 billion dollar company to move quietly, Amazon is doing so. Of late it has been on a tear. In a recent interview with Harvard Business Review, Jeff Bezos talks about their obsession with customers. As he explains it, they provide low price, vast selection and fast delivery as their core value proposition to their customer. Every decision they make is centered around what is best for their customer. To support their value proposition, they are constantly experimenting at all levels and picking and choosing their long term bets. One such bet that is poised to payoff is Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is a project where they have opened their platform to developers and allow them to write programs that work on top of Amazon's services. This has the potential to increase the number of products that can be sold on AMZN's platform, which in turn positively impacts their value proposition of providing a greater selection to their customers. This notion of experimentation coupled with their clear set of customer values is positioning them well.

I had the opportunity today to present some trends in the IT outsourcing industry to Babson's alumni. Let me recap some of the points that I made in my prepared remarks. IT outsourcing is moving from cost arbitrage based thinking to more of a distributed work thinking, where the work gets fulfilled where it finds the right expertise at the right price, availability and the desired quality. Business models have evolved from time and materials based application, development and maintenance projects to things like BPO, Captive services, Remote services management, and KPO. In fact, some vendors are thinking about moving customers dynamically between models based on, say, rupee fluctuations. The third trend is multi-sourcing. Although this concept is old, some interesting developments have occurred here. Even in situations where companies are signing mega deals (over a billion dollars) it is not uncommon to see multiple vendors in the mix. Under these circumstances, it is important to manage the coordination complexity of projects. Firms like TPI and Everest have entered into the ecosystem to help companies reduce the coordination complexity. In addition, collaboration and workflow management tools that help reduce the complexity are beginning to showup in the marketplace.The final trend that is interesting is centered around innovation. As firms use these outsourcing deals to innovate, they involve many vendors with distinct expertise that end up co-creating value. In these circumstances, who owns the IP and how is value shared and appropriated?

Why is Bungie taking Halo out of Microsoft? I went through my notes at the time of the acquisition and it said -- "Bungie is an independent developer of action oriented computer and video games. Microsoft gains exclusive publishing and distribution rights to select Bungie-developed titles, including the highly anticipated sci-fi action epic 'Halo.' Bungie made games for Apple computers." Since Xbox is very dependent on Halo, how would this separation help? Are they planning to write for other consoles? Another possibility is that Bungie developers may have felt stifled under Microsoft. Either way, I'm not sure that this benefits Microsoft.