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Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#21

Post by adventured »

peteretep wrote: post #9

Help me understand how: "We learned from our failures and stayed stubborn on the vision" isn't mutually exclusive

He's talking about failures related to individual steps on the way to the greater vision of what Amazon is supposed to represent as a value proposition to customers.

A single failure on a step, such as the Fire Phone for example, doesn't imply a failure of the overall vision ("Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.").

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#22

Post by rhizome »

kahwooi wrote: post #14
msandford wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon isn't making any money yet. Amazon makes TONS of money. They aren't currently returning any of it to shareholders as profits, they're continuously reinvesting it in the company. The difference between gross profit and net profit is how much Amazon is spending on building new businesses that after a few years start grossing $10b a year in sales like AWS. That got funded out of the gross profits from regular A…

LOL. Ballmer say so: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/ex-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-...

Ballmer isn't conflicted or anything.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#23

Post by wheat7420 »

peteretep wrote: post #9

Help me understand how: "We learned from our failures and stayed stubborn on the vision" isn't mutually exclusive

Your quote is from the section where they are explaining their first attempt at an auction house and how it failed but how their current system of third party retailers is implementing a similar idea in a successful way.

They kept the same vision/goal but they learned from how their first attempt failed and iterated on it until it succeeded.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#24

Post by sharkweek »

sabalaba wrote: post #12

I see this letter as an attempt at vindication for the controversy sparked by the NYT article on Amazon's corporate culture. Jeff Bezos was clearly affected and I see this as a defense of their "distinctive culture". "For better or for worse" that culture got them to $100 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history.

I live in Seattle and am friends with a lot of Amazon folks. Most work very hard and complain from time to time, but I only know one who left for another job because most who are there now actually really like their jobs.

One friend put it best after he transitioned from a small department in the ecommerce side of the business to one of AWS's early-ish hires, that most young departments have the thrill of working at a startup but with some very supportive corporate backing (as long as things are growing).

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#25

Post by crucifiction »

sabalaba wrote: post #12

I see this letter as an attempt at vindication for the controversy sparked by the NYT article on Amazon's corporate culture. Jeff Bezos was clearly affected and I see this as a defense of their "distinctive culture". "For better or for worse" that culture got them to $100 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history.

Most of his shareholder letters are like this. Even the 1997 reprint they put in every year as part of the letter talks a lot about the company philosophy and culture. Certainly some of the stuff at the end about new programs for parents and students is from NYTimes, but I think the rest of it is consistent belief/action since the start of the company.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#26

Post by themartorana »

ryptophan wrote: post #11
kahwooi wrote: post #6

Amazon isn't making any money yet. Maybe in future they will make some. I don't like using AWS (I just don't know why), I prefer Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.

Haven't tried Azure yet - will give it a spin eventually. I love Digital Ocean compared to AWS. Sure, AWS has a lot of bells and whistles, but this simplicity of DO is just what I need most times.

AWS has moved on from single-EC2-instance simplicity. It's not worth it if you don't need a virtual rack of servers with all the VPC networking that comes with it.

But if you _do_ need that, like we do, it's bloody brilliant.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#27

Post by wavefunction »

sharkweek wrote: post #24
sabalaba wrote: post #12

I see this letter as an attempt at vindication for the controversy sparked by the NYT article on Amazon's corporate culture. Jeff Bezos was clearly affected and I see this as a defense of their "distinctive culture". "For better or for worse" that culture got them to $100 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history.

I live in Seattle and am friends with a lot of Amazon folks. Most work very hard and complain from time to time, but I only know one who left for another job because most who are there now actually really like their jobs. One friend put it best after he transitioned from a small department in the ecommerce side of the business to one of AWS's early-ish hires, that most young departments have the thrill of working at…

>very supportive corporate backing (as long as things are growing).

I tend to feel like this would be most corporations that aren't shooting themselves in the foot. Not that there aren't plenty of those out there.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#28

Post by ProAm »

msandford wrote: post #10
kahwooi wrote: post #6

Amazon isn't making any money yet. Maybe in future they will make some. I don't like using AWS (I just don't know why), I prefer Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.

> Amazon isn't making any money yet. Amazon makes TONS of money. They aren't currently returning any of it to shareholders as profits, they're continuously reinvesting it in the company. The difference between gross profit and net profit is how much Amazon is spending on building new businesses that after a few years start grossing $10b a year in sales like AWS. That got funded out of the gross profits from regular A…

How long should an investor wait to get any ROI on a 20 year old company? (honest question)

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#29

Post by vonklaus »

ww520 wrote: post #2

It's very telling that he devoted a large portion of the letter on AWS.

Amazon had a $7B biz in 2015[0]. I am on mobile but I believe they have more servers than google. obviously, it fits with my personal narrative/is self serving, to say that the war for search is coming, but it is.

Microsoft basically modeled azure as a more user friendly AWS, and is courting devs with the release today of integrated code search with hacker rank, as well as the push to open source a ton of tooling (similar to googledocs enterprise strategy) to get developers on the platform.

msft also is pushing blockchain on azure, likely because it is interesting to developers and they have failed miserably to get payments done like apple & google.

Search is going to be big as ecosystems narrow, however outside of this, and to your point, AWS is a very valuable part of AMazons strategy.

Never in the world (maybe robber baron era but quite dif) has anyone owned the entire channel. Amazon:

1. Retailer of physical things.

2. marketmaker for physical things.

3. producer, market maker, and retail distribution for dogital goods.

4. last-mile delivery of physical goods.

5. backbone provider for phys goods (registered shipping broker)

6. owner of infrastructure of most of the conpetitors. in the christensen innovators dillemma sense, they don't have it. if someone does sonethong better than them and scale, they are hedged by getting paid for theyre infrastructure.

so interesting stuff. as search becomes less of a monopoly and continues to be edged out by ancilliary products, google is going to invest heavily in infrastruct. you can see them doing this now as they get cash together, tighten focus and embrace this meta stricture.

Short Term, AMZN is likely to be richest company in the world. excepting maybe Apple as they continue to build product & transition into an o2o Bank & Finance institution. they already are quite large, having users with accounts, they're own quasi credit card & payment system, and capital reserves. this lesves aside their lending activities (at tje supply chain level) snd affiliate marketing with barclaycard ect

0. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topp...

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#30

Post by darkclarity »

shuri wrote: post #3

You have to love this sentence "We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member."

I like being that irresponsible one.

Though it is impressive that Amazon has turned a delivery fee - that most people don't like paying - into an exclusive subscription service. A service that customers fall over themselves to sign up for when it's offered at a discount.

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