Customer obsession would be things like implementing bill caps on new account creation.
Customer obsession would be NOT shipping buggy, unreliable software like AWS Amplify.
Customer obsession would be CloudFormation-first.
Customer obsession would be not forcing me to upgrade to a paid Support account to report a bug.
The list goes on, unfortunately. I do believe AWS employees mean what they say, but the external reality (IMO) is it takes a lot of time and effort to get AWS to notice their customers unless you're one of the big boys.
Bill caps sound great until you leave one on on a production system and your whole business comes crashing down during a spike in customer traffic.
Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
CloudFormation is wonderful and essential. But AWS clearly optimizes for delivery speed. SOME service customers want Cloudformation from day 1. Others would rather have the API first, and have CFN a few months later.
> Bill caps sound great until you leave one on on a production system and your whole business comes crashing down during a spike in customer traffic.
Hence the "ask on account creation". If I want a dev account, I can choose to cap it. The amount of SMB that would benefit from this is staggering.
> Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
A major difference being that my company isn't worth $1T+.
I've used AWS for a long time and spoken at length with many wonderful, intelligent people in the company; and I didn't mean to tread on anyone's toes, I just wanted to express how it feels as a customer who spent >£150k/month for half a decade.
Amazon is in the news right now for employees making tone-deaf dishonest public statements trying to deflect legitimate criticism. Out of respect for your employer, please stop.
I guess 'customer obsession' would be giving away everything for free?