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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

Conspicuously missing are a couple of other ingredients of Amazon's success. There are plenty of companies out there with "customer obsession" and a "day 1" mentality. There are few others with such good investor relations that money keeps pouring in after two decades of paltry or negative earnings [1]. With this kind of "infinite runway" you can sometimes afford to lose $100 million over three months to drive a competitor out of the market [2]. You can also afford to negotiate sweetheart deals with UPS and FedEx that will offer you delivery rates and speeds available to few other companies [3].

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...

[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...

[3] https://sellerengine.com/should-you-use-amazon-discounted-up...

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He didn't start out with that kind of size. He built it from nothing, with strong competitors like Walmart who had more volume for physical goods that could negotiate better deals with UPS and FedEx for years.

AWS is beating Google, Microsoft, etc. Those companies had as much free cash flow and more engineering resources.

He has good investor relations because he produces great returns.

So, yes, your facts are correct, but you are wrong in an essential way: Investor goodwill and the market position is built by Day 1 mentality and customer obsession, not the other way around. A few bad moves will quickly erode both. Look at Blackberry, Dell, HP, Nokia, Westinghouse, Samsung etc. All these companies had massive market positions and investor confidence, with stock prices to match.

And how do you account for survivor bias? I don't think the CEOs of Blackberry or Nokia would have agreed that they cared less about the customer than Jeff Bezos. "Customer obsession" is not actual, actionable advice because it's not even measurable. It's nice rhetoric, but other companies were judged on hard metrics of profits and dividends.

> "Customer obsession" is not actual, actionable advice because it's not even measurable.

Not quantitatively perhaps, but qualitatively? Oh yes; it can be felt. There are some very large organizations where the employee and managers' main objectives are to get themselves a promotion or bigger bonus and, though it's never explicitly said, the health of the company or welfare of the customer is only a secondary goal.

Huh? Nokia and especially Blackberry failed to address "Customer obsession" and just stood in slack jawed denial while an innovative company ate their lunch. e.g. [1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/rim-ceo-quotes-2011-9

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