The New Kingmakers Quotes

“Developers are the most-important, most-valuable constituency in business today, regardless of industry. Technologists newly empowered with tools, hyper-connected via specialized collaboration and communication networks, and increasingly aware of their own value are no longer content to be mere stage players. They’re taking an active hand at direction. That genie is out of the bottle, and will not be returned to it. Businesses will never have the same control over developer populations that they once did, even if the supply of developers eventually comes closer to matching the demand. Now that developers have finally been handed the tools to control their own destiny, they are taking full advantage and making their influence known, both through the technologies they use and the ones that they ignore.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Bezos informed his technical staff that henceforth every point of communication within Amazon would be through an interface (API) that could be exposed externally, that there would be no exceptions, and that anyone who didn’t follow this rule would be fired. Unsurprisingly, within a few years every service within Amazon was exposed via these APIs. As discussed previously, this not only increased Amazon’s own ability to dynamically reassemble its own infrastructure, it meant that Amazon’s services could be anyone’s services. Individual developers could use Amazon’s own servers and storage almost as if they were Amazon employees. Anyone with the time and inclination could build their own storefront, their own application, their own services that drove business back to Amazon. Technologists often talk about the “Not Invented Here” problem: the reluctance to adopt something invented elsewhere. Bezos’s mandate was the polar opposite of this: it was a realization that Amazon could never be all things to all people, but that it could enable millions of developers to use Amazon services to go out and target markets that Amazon itself could never reach.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“If software adoption is the goal, it’s critical to reduce the friction to adoption. Ensure that your software is flexibly licensed, packaged for every potential operating system, available on the cloud, and as usable out of the box as possible.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Given two technologies, the one that’s easier to obtain, configure, and use will usually be the one that wins. Convenience trumps features  —  even in situations where the more-convenient project is functionally inferior.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“At MySQL, there were 400 employees in 40 countries, with 95% of the development staff working from home. The challenges this model presented, from time zone differences to communication technologies to project coordination to legal and commercial logistics, were immense. But it offset these costs with hard savings on real estate, salaries, and improvements in productivity. Most importantly, allowing workers to work remotely is like selling from the Internet: you’re no longer limited by your local geography.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“The days of recruiting developers to where you are is over. You have to go to where they are.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Amazon realized the importance of recruiting developers early  —  moving its entire organization to services-based interfaces. At the time, this was revolutionary; while everyone was talking about “Service Oriented Architectures,” almost no one had built one. And certainly no one had built one at Amazon’s scale. While this had benefits for Amazon internally, its practical import was that, if Amazon permitted it, anyone from outside Amazon could interact with its infrastructure as if they were part of the company. Need to provision a server, spin up a database, or accept payments? Outside developers could now do this on Amazon’s infrastructure as easily as employees. Suddenly, external developers could not only extend Amazon’s own business using their services  —  they could build their own businesses on hardware they rented from the one-time bookstore, now a newly minted technology vendor.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“their book Information Rules, Haas School of Business Professor Carl Shapiro and Google Chief Economist Hal Varian claim that “the profits you can earn from a customer  —  on a going forward, present-value basis  —  exactly equal the total switching costs.” This, more than Apple’s design abilities, and even more than its supply chain excellence, may be the real concern for would-be Apple competitors.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“The ascendance of open source is not altruistic; it’s simply good business for contributors and consumers alike. But the reason it’s good business is that it makes developers happier, more productive, and more efficient.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Where businesses once saw outsized returns from the code they wrote, today it’s merely a means to an end. It’s often not even a competitive advantage. What does this mean for those in the commercial software business? When considered in the context of acqhiring, it means that people are increasingly more valuable than the software they produce.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“The success of these projects and others like them is thanks to developers. The millions of programmers across the world who use, develop, improve, document, and rely upon open source are the main reason it’s relevant, and the main reason it continues to grow. In return for this support, open source has set those developers free from traditional procurement. Forever. Financial constraints that once served as a barrier to entry in software not only throttled the rate and pace of innovation in the industry, they ensured that organizational developers were a subservient class at best, a cost center at worst. With the rise of open source, however, developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses  —  only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“With the cost of development down by an order of magnitude or more, the throttle on developer creativity has been removed, setting the stage for a Cambrian explosion of projects. Four major disruptions drove this shift: open source, the cloud, the Internet, and seed-stage financing.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“In other words, some of the biggest software firms aren’t considered software firms because they’re making money with software, not from it. Their software isn’t the commercial asset, but merely an enabler to an alternative business model.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Imagine a labor market so tight that recruiting is done via acquisition. This is the reality that the technology industry faces today.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“Vendors are becoming aware that their future relevance and viability will depend not on their salespeoples’ willingness to let the CIO beat them at a round of golf, but their ability to get the rank and file to genuinely value their technologies. As we’ll see, those that manage this transition most successfully turn sales from a costly and complex negotiation to a fait accompli.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

“In an industry where usage is a function of purchase rather than a real desire for the item, technology providers will obviously optimize for the purchasing process. But in reality, that is no longer true today, and hasn’t been true for years. As with IM or the iPhone, technology is increasingly being driven by bottom-up, rather than top-down, adoption. The world has changed, but only a select few in the technology industry have realized it. As William Gibson might put it, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
― Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World