Gateways to the Internet: The Kings of Disaggregation

Continuing from last week, let us discuss why did the Webscale companies become so big. I will take an example of Dubai Mall, I am taking you back to the shopping mall discussion, the location vs stores vs experience discussion that we had considered sometime back.

The Dubai Mall is part of the Burj Khalifa complex, which is the tallest man-made structure built so far. I have no doubt that we can end up building something even grander in the future.  Dubai Mall is over 12 million square feet (equivalent in size to more than 50 soccer fields) and is the largest shopping mall in the world based on the total area. The mall contains more than 1,200 shops. If you were to go shopping in this mall, how much time will you need to go to all the shops? I guess, no one goes to all the shops, as no one may have enough time.

Let us say that you wanted to buy men’s shoes and that you entered the mall through Gate X, you wanted to go to Nike, so you went to look the store index at the Mall to find the location. But when you were looking for the Index, you found a hoarding declaring that Adidas has a promotion going on and that it is good enough to sway your decision, you decided to have a look at the Adidas Store. You liked what you saw and Nike lost some business that day.

What if you saw the Nike store even before you saw the store index, you would have missed the Adidas promotion, and just bought Nike shoes and come home.

Many of the decisions that we make are not based on “Global Best” or “Global Minima”; we usually go for a good enough solution, because we do not have infinite time or infinite resources. So the “Location” does matter after all?

What if we had entered from Gate Y and we saw the Adidas store first and saw the promotion? We would have ended up buying Adidas.

Does the “Location” of the Store or the “Location” of the Gate matter more? What if I tell you that 90% of the people looking for shoes enter through Gate X and that Nike store is right on Gate X, what do you think of the “Location” now?

What if this mall is the Internet, what does location even mean?

Think about these Ideas and let me know your thoughts.

Stay tuned, I will continue to explore this Idea further next week.