After learning about my move to b5media, a friend of mine, Mike Urlocker, urged me to read Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Given it's a monster of a book, he suggested I read the chapter on "Defining a Business". Drucker's writing is pretty dense so it took some time to get a handle on the crucial point he was expounding: focus on the customer, and what they want, what they need and, most important, what they will buy. It seems like pretty straightforward advice because the customer is always right, right? But the more I thought about it, the more it's probably something that doesn't receive enough attention. For many businesses, the focus is on the product or service, and then trying to figure out how to convince consumers to buy it. There's nothing wrong with this approach but if you meet the needs of the customer, the rest of the equation (sales, profits, etc.) should fall into place - at least in theory. Apologies for another YouTube reference but the secret to it success is it provided consumers with what they wanted: easy access to video content when they wanted it. Of course, YouTube needs to focus on its other important customer, the advertiser, but the company's popularity is a pretty simple proposition when you think about it.
Update: Speaking of Mike Urlocker, he has a post, including a citation of Peter Drucker, that questions YouTube's value. "Is that worth $1.6 billion? No, because YouTube has no base of paying customers. For all the hype of Web 2.0 and other nonsense, there is no better indicator of a bad business than an absence of paying customers."