The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented. They come from inventing new questions.[seth g - who else?]
This was up for a while before xmas 2012, but dumped and rewritten it fits nicely into the mid-May schedule here in 2013. Namely, dropping on May 17th, as we celebrate our constitution from 1814 (200 next year) and with some extra focus on woman suffrage (100 years). Both events signify a break from "how things are" - and the mental leaps involved for those pushing for the changes seem staggering even today.
Did Jeff Bezoz start Amazon to own a database on movie actors? Or to sell computing power by the hour? No, but along the way it made sense to understand as much as possible about the content sold (dvd, now streaming movies, hence IMDB) - and also to take infrastructure to scale (first Marketplace, the AWS)
Did Netflix set out to ship more than a billion DVD's back and forth? No, but at that time and place it made sense. And now they've passed 30 million streaming subscribers. And are doing it atop AWS, a sideshow for Amazon but a vital foundation for a new wave of start ups and reboots.
When something seems impossible, it is probably because your are looking at the world as nails. Sure, that makes sense with a hammer, but the toolbox holds so much more. Take a step back. Reframe the issue, and start asking a different set of questions.
Hard?
Otherwise it wouldn't be worth it.
