The Battle for the Default Way

by Eric Friedman

Screenshot 2014-10-14 09.59.39I recently finished reading the Everything Store about Amazon and can highly recommend it. It’s a business book, but also tells the amazing story about how Amazon came to exist and the way in which they battled through tough internal and external problems.

One theme throughout the book is the focus on being the default way in which people shop online.

Each business decision made seems to reinforce the foundation of amazon as the default way to shop – for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.

I know many talk about the frugality of Amazon and the process oriented company, but I think the assault on breaking peoples “default” behavior is admirable.

The much discussed focus of Jeff Bezos has always been putting the customer first. I believe that is the Amazon Prime “directive”, but the ancillary benefit of that is becoming the default choice to make a purchase.

I know that in my household it has become the default place to start a search for a product we need to buy, and sometimes sorting by “Prime” makes life easier.  Whether that purchase is a book, or literally any other item, you can see the progression of how the business was built around shoring up their position to be the default choice.

Thinking about this battle I wanted to see if I could come up with others battling to be defaults and see the current winners (defaults) for me:

Search = Google
Watch something specific =  ill search YouTube
Missed media = I’ll check netflix first
Buy something = I’ll check Amazon  Prime first (as a prime member this influences everything)
News = Twitter, TechMeme, Hacker News
Email = Gmail app on iphone (vs native app, because of poor native search)
Todos and notes = Evernote
Bookmarks = Evernote (clipping in Chrome)
Browsing = Chrome
Screen Shots = Dropbox (userped from Cloud App)
Backup = Dropbox (although I recently duplicated my backups on OneDrive)

I am going to try to keep a running list a refer back every so often here. There are probably more services and categories I am forgetting but I wanted to get this out there as a start.

What are some of your defaults?