Steve Towers

"I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need."

That really describes the dfference between inside-out thnking (examine your capabilities and figure out how to optimise them) to Outside-In - figure out the Customer needs and align everthing to deliver the Successful Customer Outcome.
http://bit.ly/AmazonOutsideIn

Both organisations are VERY successful and represent the embodiment of Outside-In:

Steve Jobs "the Customer Experience is the process", and Jeff Bezos "..rather than ask what are we good at and what else we can do with that skill, you ask who are our customers? What do they really need? And then you say we're going to give them that.."

In the light of recent product launches from Apple e.g. iPad2. So how do their business models compare?

Here is an excellent review of the difference and an indicator of who is going to win the race...

1.     Seek - Focus on what you do want, rather than on what you don’t

·         How are you approaching performance improvement?

·         Do you continue to search for things to stop doing?

2.     Shape – Identify the customers and staff you require and trust them

Although Best Buy gets its fair share of customer complaints online, it responds to them in a different way due to its Outside-In philosophy. Take Twelpforce. This system lets Best Buy employees see and respond to Best Buy-related issues that Twitter uses express, and over 2,500 people are taking part. The Twelpforce system brings together several groups: customer service representatives, in-store salespeople (called blueshirts), and the Geek Squad, technicians that visit homes to render technical assistance.

To see Twelpforce in action, consider this: Earlier in the year, Josh Korin purchased an iPhone and insurance plan from a Chicago Best Buy. His iPhone stopped working one day, and the store's staff gave him a loaner BlackBerry to replace it. He didn't want this -- especially since he bought insurance -- so he tweeted his disapproval. He did this on the weekend, but even so, customer service representative Coral Biegler tweeted back at him. The very next day, she had...