Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Amazon's broad but shallow services ultimately drive customers to specialized alternatives

Todd McKinnon · Todd McKinnon CEO of Okta: Top 10 Learnings Building a High Performance Organization (Updated) · Apr 13, 2024 · at 26:15

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon explains how tech incumbents launching non-core features inadvertently generate leads for specialized standalone vendors.

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“Amazon tends to, they're doing a lot of things, but nothing super deep. They're successful a lot with the services that are broad and don't have to be super deep. But the ones they have that are more, not as deep, they tend to get customers excited about them, and then they need a real alternative once they get rolling.”

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