Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company tr…
You could almost be talking about Steve Jobs there.
It just so happened that Jobs's companies were mostly highly (sometimes obscenely) profitable, while Amazon stays very near profitless for last ~20 years, having to re-invest all its proceedings.
I flew up in First Class on Virgin to Seattle next to a key lead on the fire phone. We had a nice long talk about the project and what happened. He vehemently defended the Fire Phone and touted its great and unique aspects while I examined it and admired the hard work he put in. 3D modeling, gyroscopic-driven interactions, an universal activity feed -- some interesting stuff was there... But there were some serious p…
Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company tr…
What sometimes tends to happen is that people who are extremely skilled in one area can fool themselves into thinking that they are also skilled in some other area. Whether that's actually true or not is kind of random, but frequently enough they're just fooling themselves. It's a kind of inspired overconfidence, and not listening to doubters is a way to achieve that.
The actual skills and intuitions they have may simply not have carried over, and it is their fault if they managed to fool themselves like that.
That's life. Companies make bets, hire people to execute, and when things don't work out, plans change and staffing sometimes need to adjust. No reason to bash Bezos for taking gambles. They certainly didn't risk the company.
The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already? The same is true for Google. So much lip service about moonshots and long term thinking and the new CFO comes in and talks about cost discipline and potentially capital return. Turns out dual class shares don't make you anymore 'long-term focu…
The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already?
Because they are investing their cash in the business, not just spending it. Investing means knowing when an investment is doing poorly and not throwing good money after bad.
You could almost be talking about Steve Jobs there.
It just so happened that Jobs's companies were mostly highly (sometimes obscenely) profitable, while Amazon stays very near profitless for last ~20 years, having to re-invest all its proceedings.
Why is this always the case? I've been on a couple of projects that were complete flops, devs are always first to go. Meanwhile the idiots who actually wasted all the money and bloated the feature set start working on version "2.0".
Those "idiots" are now the ones that learned an expensive set of lessons to apply to that v2
So the people that came up with the failed idea get to come up with more flops.
The people that built the flop get to look for a new job building someone else's future flops.
I'm waiting for the surge of native developers fleeing from the food delivery gold rush startups before starting on our native app.
I flew up in First Class on Virgin to Seattle next to a key lead on the fire phone. We had a nice long talk about the project and what happened. He vehemently defended the Fire Phone and touted its great and unique aspects while I examined it and admired the hard work he put in. 3D modeling, gyroscopic-driven interactions, an universal activity feed -- some interesting stuff was there... But there were some serious p…
I've heard this from several engineers at amazon, it's one of the reasons I don't bother calling their recruiters back.
Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company tr…
In the end, this comes down to a question of ends justifying the means. I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that the company has done very well in many ways. So has Apple. We've learned that both Jobs and Bezos weren't/aren't very good people to work for. Maybe it's naive of me to think this way, but I'd like to think that companies can be wildly successful without being life sucking and horrible in the proc…
No first hand experience, but I've heard/read this many times that Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc aren't good people to work for. Are there any bosses of mega corporations that are good to work for?