Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…Does Amazon do public relations differently? Do they do it better? Have they somehow found the magic that the other major tech companies have lacked? Or is reality simply catching up to them now? I think there’s a bigger challenge, in general, for a company like Facebook where, if you think about public relations, it’s very tied up into the media and that sort of area, where there’s a certain tension already in that sort of relationship, particularly when it comes to the health of their underlying businesses. Whereas Amazon is a bit more removed from that. Amazon is also so customer focused that everyone uses Amazon, everyone likes Amazon. It’s not part of the conversation in that regard. I think to the extent Amazon has gotten poor public relations, it’s sort of being ginned up — ginned up sounds bad — it’s being built up by people that are concerned about its tremendous power in the economy. Arguably, they are the strongest of all, particularly if you look at them from a supplier perspective. But that’s very different than a groundswell of political movement, which is almost the sentiment around Facebook these days. So it’s more a matter of their position relative to society and the dialogue generally that shields them. The other thing they do, though, as far as a strategy goes, is they just don’t engage. When there was that big thing in the New York Times about working conditions, certainly they pushed back and pushed back very strongly. But by and large, they aren’t generally in the thick of it, whereas Facebook and Google, particularly Facebook — they’re very eager to explain themselves. It’s arguably that explaining themselves that gets themselves in trouble more than anything else. Why is it that tech companies might make “obvious” strategic mistakes? What’s your simplest model of that?…

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