When profitability, not customers, is your focus… then of course they did.
>"Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."[1]
It's probably no surprise that this is little more than a meme whose sole purpose is to be ceremonially regurgitated during job interviews.
[1] https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
The problem lies in the fact that there's no one single definition of who "the customer" is, and no one single definition of what the best thing for that customer is. One team might see customer obsession as making sure only the best ads are shown, but there's probably another team who thinks that being obsessed about customers means showing the _most_ ads, while a third team sees _the ad companies_ as "the customer" and thinks that being customer obsessed means making them as happy as possible.
There's a weird side effect about being so serious about customer obsession. Like I mentioned earlier, it's often used as a promotion criteria, so people will come up with weird stuff and then spin it as "customer obsessed" so they can get promoted, even if it's something like showing more ads or constantly reminding people to buy something (which probably gets spun as "helping the customer to not miss out on a good deal" or something like that).
From the post that we are commenting on here:
>"... show that company executives, including former CEO Jeff Bezos, knowingly made changes to the e-commerce platform that boosted profits while harming consumers and sellers, and making the site less usable."
It's pretty clear who the customer were here. It's literally all the parties that were not Amazon.
Something that "gets cited in meetings" yet not applied in practice pretty much supports it being little more than meme status.
So no, it's not very clear.
(I'm not at all claiming this is unique to Amazon. But it uh. Does seem to be the case there. Like most large companies.)
Even with the Customer Obsession LP, it's not too hard of a stretch to arrive at a conclusion where more ads are shown. Better are worse are, in many aspects, quite subjective in these areas.