Zappos is a very interesting company. What has made them successful might be considered counter-intuitive to some. Their focus on the customer and not the competition, their corporate culture and not cutting costs on the balance sheet are but a few oddities that make them unique.
Odd maybe, but it seems to me they have hit on something that spell real success. Culture is important. Passion is important. Being able to rely on team members to do their job is important. And as a company who write all their own software from CRM to the engine that drives their ecommerce site, being able to rely on their programming team is a key to execution. Their costs must be extravagant. No drops-ships (warehousing everything that is sold), no scripts in the call centers(empowering their employees to make key decisions on behalf of the customer), and no discounts (you won’t find a zappos coupon anywhere), mean there isn’t a lot of room to appeal to our commoditized low-priced Wal-mart-like culture. And did I mention they write all their software in house? And they are going to roll-out a re-write in Java within weeks?
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“Well yeah, that's the thing.” -- 
