I would argue that AWS does not have a "Customer Obsession", and that's exactly why it's Amazon's most profitable business (by far) and the underwriter of all of Bezos's ambitions.
AWS does indeed obsess about the customer. Every step along the chain there is someone there advocating for the customer. There are mechanisms to keep the customer in mind even for the developers who actually code the service and don't talk to customers on a daily basis.
I've had many, many service team members shadow me as I worked their service's tickets. This is explicitly so they can see in real time customer pain-points. If a customer has a question about a unique use case, the service team will proactively reach out to support engineers to set up a call to discuss the use case further. There are monthly (or twice-monthly) meetings between support service owners (i.e. those people in support who 'own' a service) and service teams to identify the top issues customers are having with the service. AWS is constantly looking for ways to better assist customers, make support less difficult for customers, increase self-service options for customers, etc.
I'm really, really curious where the basis behind your argument. Because from everything I've seen and been a part of, it's simply untrue.
I guess 'customer obsession' would be giving away everything for free?
Customer obsession would be NOT shipping buggy, unreliable software like AWS Amplify.
Customer obsession would be CloudFormation-first.
Customer obsession would be not forcing me to upgrade to a paid Support account to report a bug.
The list goes on, unfortunately. I do believe AWS employees mean what they say, but the external reality (IMO) is it takes a lot of time and effort to get AWS to notice their customers unless you're one of the big boys.
Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
CloudFormation is wonderful and essential. But AWS clearly optimizes for delivery speed. SOME service customers want Cloudformation from day 1. Others would rather have the API first, and have CFN a few months later.
Hence the "ask on account creation". If I want a dev account, I can choose to cap it. The amount of SMB that would benefit from this is staggering.
> Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
A major difference being that my company isn't worth $1T+.
I've used AWS for a long time and spoken at length with many wonderful, intelligent people in the company; and I didn't mean to tread on anyone's toes, I just wanted to express how it feels as a customer who spent >£150k/month for half a decade.
I feel dirty defending AWS, but this is one case I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. There must be _a_ reason they haven't implemented this yet and that reason must be somehow protecting the customer. "Customers want this" ends the discussion around here. You must have a really good reason to disagree.
Like $35 bank overdraft fees protect the customer from not getting a candy bar.