Okay, so "being nice" equates to "offer good value at a fair price", eg don't suck your customers dry. That makes perfect sense.<p>I do think a little bit of ruthlessness is called for, especially when your most important metric (growth) is coming at the expense of your competitors. Examples abound of this -- and I think that it can be enormously beneficial to study companies that have operated in moral "gray areas", both in how it helped them establish their position in the market, and how it hurt them. (More often than not, the "damage" is a rather superficial PR dent...) Look at Microsoft crushing Netscape, Apple playing hardball with everybody (including their supply chain), AirBNB with Craigslist, then skirting hotel regs, Uber in everything they do. For all these companies, from a consumer perspective, it's hard to argue they don't provide "good value for a fair price," even though their business practices often lead to nerd outrage here on HN.<p>That being said, a singular strategy of "being nice" (eg, offering good value at a fair price) could be enough for winning customers. Often this seems to happen if your product is so far superior that customers (or users) naturally gravitate towards you. That is how Google got big, and seems to be the modus operandi for social businesses (Facebook, Twitter, etc).<p>In fact, I think the only place where you can get away with not "being nice" is in extremely bureaucratic customer environments where success is dictated by the skill of your sales team -- the realm of Oracle, government contractors, etc. Those are also very interesting to study, but for different reasons.