OPEN wins over CLOSED: BestBuy vs. Wal-Mart (and the rest) in the API WARS
BestBuy demonstrates how to navigate the API and Web 2.0 landscape in a vertical market by releasing a publicly available REST-based API Call called REMIX. As Joshua-Michele Ross reports:
“While other big box stores are thinking small and releasing unappetizing Facebook widgets like this:
Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores. “
This is the kind of technology leadership that companies like BestBuy has to demonstrate in vertical market like market to go against the paradox of retail companies usually being behind on internet technology advances (and usually embracing to the bitter end, legacy systems). Hopefully Wal-Mart and the other companies will follow suit.
posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo
