Customer Obsession [Steve Yegge]

Listen to Steve Yegge's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0xmHrQJdAwthefirst in this little series was i talkedabout their ability to root out diseaseand dysfunction in theorganization and squash it immediatelythe second one was about their focus onretail customers and individual peopleand how they put that front and centerin first and foremost and there was noalso customer service mentality therein this episode what we're talking aboutisthat situation where grabs servers wouldrun on amazon's cloudso it's like a rental service it's likewe rent computersfrom from amazon and we have otheroptions we could have been on google'scloud we could have been on microsoft'scloud and there were some effortsactually to get onto microsoft's cloudat least part of the computing just toreally mostly i think for negotiatingleverage butbut the reality was grab was not reallythat importanti mean there are a lot of companies oncloudessentially someday all companies thathave any sort of computing in thebackground which is most companies willhave uh a cloud presence okayand so you know huge huge names you knownetflix runs on amazongo figure they don't have their own datacenters as far as i knoweverything you know i certainly knowtheir biggestthey're uh they're amazon's biggestcustomer or they have been and they goin and out of being amazon's biggestcustomeryou look at the top 50 customers foramazon and uh grabs not in that listyou look at the top 100 customers andgrabs probably not in that list just interms of how much they're spending okaycorporate customers uh you know prettypretty sizable chunk of money but notnot really a blip at amazon scaleand yetuhwhenever i had a question uh aboutamazon's cloud let me tell you what iwhat i didokayumi would sayhey bob can you come over here for a secyeahnotice i'm not touching a phone or acomputer uhi'm talking to bob over here who who isfrom amazon he's an amazon employee he'sa cloud specialist and uh knows how toanswer a lot of customer questions uhhe's an engineer uh and and sue you knowbob and sue she would do the same thingthey'd come in we had all these thesedifferent account reps in a rotationuh and they would uh they would comeover and say yeah what do you need whatdo you need what were they doing in myoffice in graham's office in downtownbellevue we're not a top 100 customerthey can't that how does that even scalethey can't have enough people to go andsit on site with every single customernow you could make the argument oh wellgrabs kind of important because you knowthey're going to be the gateway tosoutheast asia and so on and so they'remasasan's investment they're big and youknow there's a lot of you know smoke andmirrors and you know it's it's all trueand it's going to come true and and grabis going to be dominant but it's neverbeen a foregone conclusion i mean uberwas competing with him and then nowgojek's competing with him and gojek hasa bunch of really big investors and it'snot clear-cut right you know thatthey're that they're gonna be big andwhy would you bet on a customer that'sgonna be big when you've already gotcustomers that are already bigand yet amazon had people sitting in ouroffices you know uh they offered we saidyesuh you know microsoft got into that andthey sent some people too and that wasthat was fine you know you know us tooumbut it was never really the sameso so i'm gonna i'm gonna close with awith a story about uh i'll close thisoff with a story about umthe conferences okay the developerconferences because those are sort of acustomer interaction sort of a way thattheycan demonstrate customer obsessionand it's kind of um it's not a directthing it's more of an indirect thing youknow and how successful the conferenceisbut you know it's a it's a it's a signaluh so the story is i was at my grab inmy ummy first yearit was 2018uh i joined just late the previous yearand uh my boss mark porterhe said hey steve yeah let's uh let's goto re inventreinvent is amazon's cloud conferenceokay it's about awsand it's in las vegas and you know i'min seattle and so it's only like a twoand a half hour flightand so it made sense you know for forfor me to go and represent uh you knowas a head of engineering and ads and allthat stuff uh but i didn't want to go uhyou know i like i don't like conferencesi don't know why i don't like them ijust don't like them like they'rethey're a waste of time they justthey're just like umi could go on and on about how howshallow they are but they're they'renothing gets done at a conferenceand they'rei don't see the point a lot of people dolike them they like they got their badgeand their lanyard and their packagesswag and they're like i'm in aconference and they feel important orsomething and people speaking atconferences feel important i've donethat too and then it was ultimately itwas like why did i do that what was whatwas the goal here right just buildingbrand recognition with developers iguessyou know fine fineit's fine that they have them and it'sfine that some people like them but ididn't want to go okay because i wasbusy like my job was very stressful andi'll talk about my job at grad and howworking with asia from the united statesis just in general in in another episodeand mark's like oh come on man you got ayear to come you got to come it's likeyou have toand he was very insistent and i'm likeokay fine you know fine i'll take thehit for the team and i'll go to lasvegas and bring my wife along and we'llupgrade our hotel room at our own on ourown dime and we'll try to make it a funtrip because conferences suck and idon't want to gobut we'll do some gamblingso we go to re invent which i've neverbeen to before in 2018anduh well i went and i learned umthere were basically three components ofthe conference that i want to compare tothe microsoft conference that i went toa couple of months laterthe uh the first one was the keynotespeechi want you to remember these things wheni talk about the microsoft ones uh thekeynote speech is you know by andy jassyi don't know if he still does it but atthe time you know for many years andyjassy would give the keynote and youknow what a keynote is right a keynoteis some self-important person standingup there and going well i'm really superglad that you all came and boy i'm suremaking a lot of money off this and let'shead u...