Here's the Amazon-influenced plan GE's CEO is banking on to remake the American icon

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“The companies I've looked at a lot are Apple and Amazon,” he explained to me on Thursday. We were sitting in GE’s offices in Boston, the sky briefly clear as storms circled the city. “The essence is: What does the customer want? What's the customer experience? We've been a hardcore engineering and product-centered company. And that's essential. We compete on technology in many ways. But that's not sufficient. And so for decades really, we were, ‘Let's just make another new thing that's better than the last thing and then we'll go into the market'." Flannery's GE — faster, fewer meetings, more GE employees visiting customers instead of creating internal binders — will know what turbines and controls will delight customers and build the products to do so. It's a B2C playbook inside one of the most B2B companies.

He is trying to talk a good line, but it's mostly just talk. He hasn't looked very closely at Amazon, or he would have realized it is basically a software company. He is still a hardware person.