Humor me here for a moment and I will get to the "Taxi Chase"

Are you unknowingly accelerating your customer attrition by upgrading to a faster database or analytics engine? The recent barrage of offerings from technology providers, promoting a newer higher horse power database or analytics engine, has made database and analytics a weapon in the war to be #1. It's less about you as a user and more about the vendors desire to win at something.

• Doing business is not a competition.
• Who sets the rules anyway?
• Who decided the metrics of being #1?
• Who agreed to play by any of the metrics we see talked about ?

Business is journey of discovery and improvement. There are no rules, just your intent. Metrics are important, but as mile stone indicators of your own journey. If you are measuring your business against another company in a bid to compete for market share, then you have to ask yourself who's business are you in?

I call this the Taxi Chase. When you jump in a taxi you really want that taxi driver to help you get to your own destination. If your taxi driver starts to race with other taxi's then you will end up chasing the other taxi to a different destination. You just may not have enough fuel to follow the other taxi to their destination. If you manage to follow to the end, then what? You have to wait for the other taxi to start another journey so you can follow, and only then you can start moving again.

This brings me back. Customer experience has to be the goal. Before you do what the taxi driver wants you to do, and change that database or analytics engine to a higher horse power version, decide where you want to go first. You just might find you don't need to get in that taxi with a crazy driver. Going faster in a car with a bent wheel will only amplify any negative experience your customer may already be having.

Yes you guessed it, this my plug for AWS. Other technology providers may very well be competing for AWS customers, they are just chasing a taxi. AWS and Amazon is focused on providing ways to find you a better business destination to achieve your highest potential. Together with you we workout what your destination should look like, then only we can decide how we want to get you there. A taxi is not the only way. AWS is famous for being customer obsessive. I hope this goes someway to explain part of what that means? I can understand why you may be looking at cloud as low cost infrastructure. I put it down to all the taxi's chasing AWS making it about price, because they don't understand where the destination is.

Welcome your comments or ping me if you want to explore more whats behind chasing the taxi article.

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