Thousand-factor growth!

Date: 02 February 2007 07:44:37

I just listened to the BBC r4 Today programme. Interview with a bloke representing Amazon, asking why they made "only" 100 million dollars profit on sales the size of a planet. (It sounds like precision pricing to me - a cause for congratulation or admiration, not criticism)

I was only half asleep, but I think I heard him say they were experiencing "thousand-factor growth" WTF is that? Does it really mean something? Or have we discovered an entire new strain of managementspeak bollocks? Or did I make it up?

Its not anywhere in Google - well it is now ;-)

That half woke me up, and I really did hear him say that Amazon is competing with the "entire retail waterfront".

That's kind of wonderful and makes me want to rant on about the way the growth and development of retail businesses parallels the evolution of prokaryotes into eukaryotes (its them Golgi bodies that count), single-celled organisms protists into metazoa, plants, fungi (etc etc), hypothetical ancestral simple blobby or tubelike animals into diploblasts and triploblasts, villages into towns into cities into megacities, and riverside wharfs into docks - which are exact analogies of Golgi bodies. Its all about increasing the surface area across which transactions can take place. But if I kick of on that one I'll never get to work this morning.

Hey, I could go off on a riff about bacterial and metabolism and ecology and how some of it is exactly analogous to competitive advantage in economics - which (unlike most of economics) is almost certainly generally true. (I think I might be able to show that, but the margin of this website is not large enough to hold the proof) Any economic theory that works for bacteria (indeed, naked enzymes) probably has something going for it. Maybe I did ought to do that PhD. If I could only work out what the question is.

Anyway, maybe these odd phrases are current in Amazon culture. Or maybe Amazon Bloke - whose name I didn't catch and can't find on the BBC R4 website and I've got better things to do than be downloading old interviews in audio format (We Love Transcripts) - is "r-selected for contributions to the lexicon" (I didn't make that up - a lecturer at Birkbeck said it about the brilliant but vile Haeckel), someone who blurts out new things to say, some of which stick, some of which don't.

Either way, its fun. More fun than Yet Another Blair Interview (YABI, YABI, YABI) which is on the radio now. The Prime Minister should go. He should have gone last year.