As we have seen, search & transfer problems abound both within and between organizations. Quora, a Q&A site, is one tool designed to make it simple to get the information you need—provided someone is willing to answer.
Enter Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. This weekend, seeing that someone had asked on Quora why more tech companies don’t run Netflix-like contests, he decided to answer the question himself: “There are not many problems suitable to prize architectures.” A valid response, to be sure, although other commenters pointed out barriers related to competitive advantage (in the form of intellectual property and maintaining user privacy/trust) and legal impediments.
Newsworthy? That’s debatable, but seeing a public collaboration tool used to discuss an innovation challenge was irresistible.
2 replies on “Q&A: From the lips of Quora users to the CEO of Netflix”
Dan – I’ve been following Quora closely, trying to learn more so I can understand if it will unseat the current Q&A models – from clever Vark to popular yet unreliable YahooAnswers. Stacking the answerer list with Silicon Valley titans helps with your street cred, for sure! I wonder if their use of the platform will continue in the long run…
These types of models have ended up either very successful or very ridiculous. It is highly dependent on the contributions of the crowd and how willing they are to generate valuable content. A very successful website using a similar model is stackoverflow, which is intended to answer all types of computer science and programming questions. A high quality query can be answered in a matter of minutes. Stackoverflow users also have a point system that creates competition among the question answerers. It’s pretty remarkable how much much harder people will work for just some street credit.