Business 2.0 interviewed Jeff Bezos of Amazon in their December issue. The topic was How to Think Competitively and Bezos had some interesting thoughts. The interviewer framed his first question on the basis that Amazon had always gone into highly competitive businesses… Bezos disagreed with this set-up:
I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. We made the choice a long time ago that we were going to be customer-obsessed rather than competitively-focused. And that’s a choice. There are a lot of very successful companies that are competitively-focused, and there’s nothing wrong with that strategy. In fact, one type of competitive-focused strategy that can be very effective is called "close-following," and it has a lot of advantages. You don’t have to go down as many blind alleys. You watch and let a competitor go down a bunch of blind alleys, and when it finds something successful, you try to copy it very quickly and out-execute them. It’s a perfectly valid strategy – it just happens not to be who we are.
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