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Let's go one by one on the examples that I provided in my post.
Amazon did not kill the retail industry. They did it to themselves with bad customer service.
Let's use Borders as an example, which is a well-documented case. For years, Borders outsourced its online book-selling to Amazon.com, so anytime you visited borders.com, you were redirected. Why on earth are you going to relinquish your customer base and experience? Besides stupidity, my guess is they did it in the name of efficiency. Borders ranked #266 out of the 926 companies in customer services. They also had too many stores, had too many debts, and overinvested in music sales. In summary, Borders lost focus.
On the other hand, Amazon is customer-obsessed to the point that everyone has to be able to work in a call center. As part of a training session each year, Jeff Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including himself, to attend a two-day call center training program. In the early days, Bezos had brought an empty chair to the meetings and informed his top executives that they should consider the empty seat as being occupied by a customer, who is "the most important person in the room." If you want to learn more about customer services lesson from Jeff Bezos, Kevin Baldacci has an excellent post on the matter from where I had drawn some of the examples.
Netflix did not kill Blockbuster. They did it to themselves, with their ridiculous late payment fees.
