Does anyone have more details about Amazon's policy of not talking directly about competitors?

It seems to be an interesting approach, but I don't think this is the whole picture.

I am thinking of two situations where I am wondering how that would work:

* small niched vs a big player that is present and known on the whole market

* small business "competing" with another small startup for the same market (eg posterous vs tumblr)

I think this is something Microsoft is doing wrong these days. They laugh at competition (Ballmer is pretty famous for this), while competition eats their markets.

I'm not sure the situation is that simple.

Steve Jobs has mocked Apple's competition for pretty much as long as I can remember... and laughed all the way to the bank.