Amazon Eats Learning?

Yesterday my colleague, Brian, told me about Amazon’s potential foray into learning management systems (LMS).  This immediately made sense to me on both a micro and macro-level.

On the micro-level Amazon has increasing demands to train its own workforce and more importantly the need to train customers on its growing AWS platform. With the exception of Intellum, my experience is that vendors in this space fail to enable frictionless consumer-grade experiences at the speed of business.

Meanwhile Amazon’s core competencies overlap with this space in terms of:

• Negotiating with publishers to get rights to distribute digital content
• Hosting and distribution of massive content
• Organization and discovery of user content across a broad catalog
• Ease of purchase and consumption for learners
• Frictionless enterprise-level purchase, configuration, and consumption via AWS

(Amazon's recommendation engine has been the envy of enterprise for years.)

As the CNBC article highlights, on the macro-level this is a compelling battlefront in the Infinity War for the cloud. We have seen Google push into the space with the acquihire of Diane Greene' Beebop and their bold launch into the recruiting space with Hire. Could Amazon be entering into the traditional talent management enterprise market with a learning management system as well?

Personally, I welcome the big boys to the party. For years, software in my field has over-promised and under-delivered. It will be interesting to see how the best developers, with the deepest pockets, and strongest reach might bring consumer-grade experiences to us with modern technology. 

However, I would like to warn the Googles and Amazons of the world that serving enterprise customers is often a humbling experience.  I say this with a unique perspective having been a product manager for SuccessFactors and TriNet and an IT manager for Facebook and LinkedIn.

Enterprise vendors don't just wake up thinking:

I'm going to give my customers and their employees an infuriating experience.

Rather, the B2B and enterprise markets are inherently more complex than the direct-to-consumer relationship. For one thing, enterprise sales is a strange and expensive animal. Similarly, business owners have been trained for decades that their particular methods represent a competitive advantage. This sometimes makes the customer uncompromising in their approach. In stark contrast, consumer systems tend to optimize for simplicity and the best overall workflows. Finally enterprise-level security and permission models are often a mystery to consumer-focused developers. This along with several other complicated and nuanced trade-off is the reason why several traditional web-developers have already failed to modernize talent acquisition and management.

If anyone would like to discuss this further, hit me up. I’m actively looking for my next job (cc: James Urquhart).