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Chapter 5: The Play and a Decision to Act
Core Focus
Transitioning from strategic analysis to execution. How mapping enables decisions about where to attack, demonstrated through building Zimki - a cloud platform preceding AWS by two years.
Two Forms of "Why"
- Purpose-driven: winning the game
- Movement-driven: tactical positioning (this chapter's focus)
The Kodak Case Study
Despite pioneering digital imaging, Kodak's film processing business created organizational inertia. They invested in photo printers exactly when camera phones made printing irrelevant. Comfortable options don't guarantee rosy futures.
Key Frameworks
Accelerators, Decelerators, and Constraints
- Accelerators: open source drives components toward commodity
- Decelerators: FUD and patents slow evolution
- Constraints: dependencies in underlying components bottleneck progress
Innovate-Leverage-Commoditise (ILC) Model
Ecosystem approach leveraging external innovators:
- Build utility components with public APIs
- Enable external companies to innovate atop your platform
- Monitor consumption metadata to identify emerging patterns
- Industrialise successful patterns as new utility services
- Repeat - creating expanding platforms
Key insight: monitoring API consumption identifies successful companies faster than marketing surveys.
Context-Specific Gameplay Categories
- User perception alteration
- Evolution accelerators/decelerators
- Ecosystem models
- Positional, defensive, attacking plays
- Poison mechanisms
The Zimki Strategy
Vision: "pre-shaved Yaks" - eliminate pointless development tasks. Code in browsers, single-language (JavaScript), no infrastructure management.
Seven strategic points:
- Code platform + component services via APIs
- Open source entire system
- Create certified provider marketplace
- Build ecosystem through common services
- Eliminate development friction
- Exploit utility infrastructure providers
- Encourage fragmented infrastructure markets
What Happened
- Beta Feb 2006 (2 years before AppEngine)
- Rapid growth: 1,000+ developers by Q1 2007
- Amazon EC2 launch validated the concept
But: Wardley ignored the board and parent company's needs. They viewed utility computing as unrealistic, refused investment, blocked buyouts, cancelled open-sourcing. Zimki closed by year-end 2006.
Key Takeaways
- Maps guide strategy but don't determine outcomes - execution requires political navigation
- Multiple user needs exist: external customers, employees, boards, parent organizations
- ILC models create powerful feedback loops via ecosystem size
- Past success creates inertia (Kodak)
- Strategy is cyclic - decisions impact corporate purpose itself
- Being strategically right means nothing if you can't navigate organizational politics