Building Plazi - thoughts from Amazon

The news this morning that Amazon got the permission to ship cargo on their own vessles from China to the States reflects the insights and conclusions behind getting a delivery of goods by Amazon at mininmal costs for use customers at a maximal profit for the company. 

Think through what you want and then where the costs are to deliver and solve those bottlenecks: In this case cut costs of coordination by controlling the entire production chain.

What would be the same in our case? What is we want to deliver? A treatment. But what is a treatment? Something customers use every day when they want to know more about a particular species or other taxon.

So we have to make the step from being a bookshop to an online delivery. That means, especially in the scientific world, people have to be aware that they can get a treatment not just out of a PDF but via a persistent identifier attached to a taxonomic name (TNU). And they have to learn, that they can get more, access to another treatment, the image, the GenSequence, etc. and that they can build chains by themselves.

Clearly, we are still, and always will, be far away from buying our own fleet of cargo vessels.  But even Amazon started to build up the trust of its customers to buy a book (a hard copy it is) online rather than in the bookshop.