I work at a small software company, and too often our CEO and company will latch onto nuggets from material like this and use it to justify a "swing for the fences", "nothing ventured nothing gained" sort of mindset. All well and good, but they blithely overlook the "we fail all the time" parts, and sometimes we take risks where the potential losses are not easy to absorb, or we don't have the vast resources of a big company to attempt a thing without impacting our mainline investment. Unfortunately, I've seen first hand that interesting, inspiring ideas can turn cargo cult real quick without some reality to temper them; namely, there are only two scenarios where you can easily justify risk (that is, not sweat over it): 1. You have nothing to lose. 2. You have relatively little to lose.
Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
101–110 of 297 posts
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL. Ballmer say so: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/ex-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-...
Ballmer isn't conflicted or anything.
Not to mention that MSFT went from $50/share to $30/share under Ballmer's tenure as CEO. Not sure he has any legs to stand on to bash AMZN about being a "real business."
http://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/gates-ballmer-mi...
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at it that way, it's kind of impressive that Yahoo! is still around.
I honestly don't have the slightest clue how yahoo stays in business. And I don't mean that as rhetoric, either. Other than Bloomberg I don't get where the money comes from. I hope it's not organized crime... I'd probably read a biography of the company out of curiosity.
All I can do is guess, but if you go to their home page take a look at the sidebar. That's a pretty impressive range of services. You can manage your email, buy stuff, check the news, see what's on TV, check the weather. It's AOL but on the web and for non-technical people having one place where you can do everything is probably pretty attractive. Especially if it came set as their web browser home page and they don't know how to change it or create bookmarks.
That's not a long term sustainable business though, as the non-tech savvy oldsters in the population get replaced by youngsters that mainly use mobile devices and apps anyway. I think Cringeley has a point. Yahoo should slim down and use it's remaining financial weight to turn itself into a tech industry specialised version of Berkshire Hathaway. Copy Google's corporate structure and hive off the portal into a subsidiary of a holding company that focuses on managing investments.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#104You have to love this sentence "We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member."
Then Amazon is going to have to become much much better. I live in London, UK and do not use Prime. I've almost stopped using Amazon altogether now. Why? 1. Delivery - For our flat, their network either fails to deliver, mis-delivers or screws up in some other way far more than they succeed. There is no option to choose the one postal service that shines for my property: Royal Mail. Anything I order from Amazon may t…
Agree with everything you said. I will add DPD in addition to Royal Mail - first, you can track the delivery van on a map, in real time. Second, you can text DPD in-flight and ask them to deliver to a local pick-up location instead of your home address. And most of all yes, shopping online with John Lewis is amazing. Their products are quality, and their service is awesome. Amazon, in comparison, is a £ shop.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I cancelled it because Amazon's abusing their position. Refusing to sell Chromecast and Apple TV, then lying, repeatedly, about the reason when asked? I've been an Amazon customer for 13 years. I was rather annoyed to see them go with the anti-Wikileaks and try to be "sensitive" by banning certain cultural items. But this shows they've zero commitment to selling products customers want. Edit: And it really hurts. Som…
> Refusing to sell Chromecast and Apple TV
This is kind of like expecting a Ford dealer to sell Chevys.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#106Am I the only one who read "Type I and II decisions" and thought "System I and II decisions" (from Thinking, Fast and Slow?). I like the idea of distinguishing reversible from irreversible decisions, I just wish he'd come up with better names...
1 vs 2 is a bad, non-mnemonic naming convention to use, for either of those cases. Sadly, it also appears in "type I vs type II" errors. Even "false positive vs false negative" isn't helpful, since the decision of what counts as "positive" is arbitrary. Better to refer to the category directly: eg, "false ham vs false spam", "false acceptance vs false rejection". While we're on the topic Amazon and bad naming, what's…
I'm not sure about "false acceptance vs false rejection" being better than "false positive vs false negative". False positive pretty much always means you give incorrect bad news; false negative means you give incorrect good news. "Acceptance" may mean either "ham" or "spam" depending on the context.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#107Occasional customer here buying only discounted goods from Amazon logistics only and always at the total minimum I need not to pay shippage. Quality is overall worsening year after year but Amazon has always been a bonanza, the day it ends thank you and good riddance, going local again.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It blew my mind that his example of helping a single mom of EIGHT was her getting trained as a long haul truck driver. Who's taking care of that many kids while she's gone? Truck driving is not that well-paid, and the length of absences is right there in the job title.
His example is a subtle jab at working class. He thinks people are such trash that truck driver is aspirational for them. The education benefits for blue collar workers at Amazon take years to kick in and don't cover a single year at most community colleges. Workers are frequently fired before 90 days to prevent benefits from starting. Workers would do far better to do a small education loan and start training early.
>He thinks people are such trash that truck driver is aspirational for them
What planet are you on? Truck driver is an excellent working class job. It's skilled labour (yes, really), you need to be trustworthy and able to operate independently, work long hours and take responsibility for a very expensive asset. As a result it pays a significant premium compared to a lot of manual labour and service jobs.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pity Prime video isn't available outside of the US/UK and 2 day shipping in Toronto...just poor value for money for Canadians.
For what it's worth, Germany also has Prime Video.
Yes, but it's probably also the only justification for paying money for prime.
I also use it mainly because it's a requirement for their DVD/Blu-Ray rental service. However that got a massive price increase the last month - so I'm considering stopping to use both.
Regarding delivery the interesting thing is that before prime emerged nearly all orders here in Germany were delivered on the next day. Then prime came up and from there on orders without prime took 2 days and looked artificially delayed so that you would have a reason to pay for prime.
Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a huge distinction that people don't make often enough with high-performing, fast-growing companies. You see it with Tesla, too, when people claim that the Model S is "sold at a loss", ignoring the fact that a large part of the company's current expenditure is in setting up huge new factories.
Bad example. New factory is an asset, not an expense. Therefore it will have little impact on profitability.
The AWS data centres aren't an asset?
I'd have thought comparing funding expanding Amazon's data centre capacity from revenue is very comparable to Tesla building out it's manufacturing capability the same way.