> You can say that about any pair of companies where one has a shipping product and the other does not
Not necessarily. Rabbits move fast and break things; tortoises plod along deliberately and slowly. This applies to Blue Origin because they’re being deliberately slow and thoughtful, versus lazy or incompetent. Theranos or Magic Leap, for instance, are not tortoises.
How is it possible for BO to spend most of their time producing and selling when they don't have a shipping product? How is it possible for SpaceX to spend most of their time designing and testing when they have a shipping product with a lot of market share?
To put it another way, there's nothing in the "most of their time" comparison that you can use to classify either company as a tortoise or a hare: they're just companies at different stages of the company lifecycle.
> they're just companies at different stages of the company lifecycle
Blue Origin is older than SpaceX. It chose to get a lot of basic engineering right before bothering with a product roadmap. They’ve spent years on a big first stage with big engines, all of which were known from the beginning to take longer to develop. Those intermediate goals, none of which are products, were pursued in the hope that they will result in a better end result.
SpaceX, instead, prioritised shortest paths to marketable products. Its intermediate goals are products. SpaceX flew (and collected orders for) its Falcon 1 a few years after being founded; Blue Origin took much longer. SpaceX tries putting paying customers everywhere it reasonably can; Blue Origin avoids the distraction.
These are distinct, deliberarely-chosen strategies. They’re not just similar companies at different points in their respective life cycles.
