Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision. Your chances of coming up with something fresh go way down when you keep feeding your brain other people’s ideas. You become reactionary instead of visionary. You wind up offering your competitor’s products with a different coat of paint. If you’re planning to build “the iPod k

When I first went to work at Microsoft, there was a person on my team who decided it would be useful—it would get him some notoriety internally—if he wrote a weekly email summarizing Microsoft's competitors. We were the Excel team, so it was really the spreadsheet competitors, Lotus and Borland—what they were doing and what was new and what feature

Although leaders pay attention to their competitors, they obsess over their customers.

Of course, we should also keep in mind "do not compete for the sake of competition". Sometimes, after a prolonged period of competition, the only goal becomes simply beating the competitor. For example, in the Microsoft-Google competition, Microsoft for a long time saw defeating Google as its goal, and invested heavily in search. It wasn't until a

“When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,” he said, reciting a well-worn and, considering the past few years of competition with Zappos, credulity-straining Jeffism. “We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.”