Quotes About Competition

Old-time tennis fans like to say the 1980s produced the greatest cast of characters and performers in tennis—McEnroe

McEnroe, Connors, Becker, Evert, Navratilova, Lendl, Borg

Nothing like a 200 pound snatch if you know what I mean.

AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies . . . once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,

In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations," says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. "But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people's products.

We pay attention to what our competitors do but it's not where we put our energy.

But don't be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused."15

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

In the copy he brought to Kathryn Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

Over time it became clear that the humans couldn't compete. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N office, a reference to the folktale of the steel driver who raced to dig a hole in competition with a steam-powered drilling machine; he won the contest but died immediately afterward.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few years later. "We didn't want to be Kodak." The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn't bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.

We don't have a single big advantage," he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O'Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. "So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.

Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn't want to repeat "Steve Jobs's mistake" of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals' investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.

If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.

For the first time, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple—not as an afterthought, but as an equal. It had blasted off into high orbit.

You've built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle," Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. "You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?" (Amazon denied that Bezos said this.)

later published a trove of these documents, which revealed Amazon execs strategizing back in 2009 to run the company's diapers business at a loss to combat the company that operated Diapers.com, and to buy the internet doorbell company Ring in 2018—not for its technology, but to gain a dominant position in the market.

There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop," he

Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have