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Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was his point, he's critical of Amazon because they lied about their reasoning for not carrying the products, not questioning the legality of not carrying specific products. I thought that was obvious, and a charitable interpretation of his post would've made this clear, I think.

Yep. Several CSRs told me "Oh it's out of stock" (not explaining the 404, or no "marketplace" vendors). I escalated. Then I was told the Chromecast was not sold due to "too many complaints". A supervisor then flat out denied that, as well as denied there being any ban on any such product. I asked about the Apple TV. After other lame "stocking" issues, a supervisor said "oh, we don't have licenses to sell Apple TV" an…

Disclaimer: I used to work at Amazon.

Amazon and Apple have had a long patchy history when it comes to selling Apple products.

Primarily it comes down to Apple's need to control the pricing of their products and Amazon's desire to drop prices far into the realms of lossmaking, which in part is due to their customer centricity. I cannot comment on this specific case but it is not always necessarily as clear cut as you think.

As an aside, the customer obsession is not fluff. It is deeply engrained within the business and is taken very seriously. Any decision that is not customer centric (e.g. Halting the sale of Harper Collins titles) is usually escalated to Diego (head of Retail) if not to Jeff himself. Any business is well within their rights to make money and preserve their self interests, and occasionally strategic decisions may well clash with the culture so not every decision Amazon makes will be perfectly customer centric. With that said, from both the inside and outside I've witnessed really great customer obsession on the whole especially when compared to other businesses.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#112
post #100
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."

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…

Also in the UK and typically I find I get most items delivered in 2 days even though I always go with the free standard delivery.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#113
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Positive means you found the special thing you are looking for; negative means you just found an ordinary thing. False positive means you thought you found the special thing but you didn't, it was just ordinary; false negative means you thought you found an ordinary thing but actually it was special.

False positives mean you throw away ham as spam (terrible), false negatives mean you let some spam into your mailbox (not a big deal). But false positives also mean you diagnose benign as malignant (annoying), and false negatives also mean you diagnose malignant as benign (fatal).

So depending on what you are looking for, it varies whether false negatives or false positives are worse. Or maybe they can be equally bad.

I don't think you need to rename positive and negative as long as positive is understood as unusual and negative is understood as normal.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#114

Earlier 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 was gifted Prime and it surprised me how awesome it was. Say I want to buy a few pairs of SmartWool Socks, but since I'm buying them over the internet don't get a chance to try them on. Do I buy 7 pairs and risk it? No, I just buy 1 pair and get it in 2 days with no shipping fee. In fact I buy all kinds of things now on Amazon because I can get them in 2 days with no shipping fee. I get that I'm paying upfront for…

> After a certain number of orders I'm beating the system, and that's fun.

That's only true if you would have bought those items anyway. If you wouldn't have then the system is beating you.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more akin to a used car lot deciding to manufacture cars, and removing Ford & Chevys from their lot. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is interesting that they only removed those two items and not Rokus and other streaming options.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#116
post #83
post #70

Earlier 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.

They're pretty big in asian markets. When I was in Tokyo everything was set with yahoo as the homepage for some reason.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Refusing to sell Chromecast and Apple TV This is kind of like expecting a Ford dealer to sell Chevys.

It's more akin to a used car lot deciding to manufacture cars, and removing Ford & Chevys from their lot. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is interesting that they only removed those two items and not Rokus and other streaming options.

When can we regulate this .... and break this company into 4 companies, that compete with each other :) I bet 3 will sell Ford and Chevy's on their display.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#118
Not 100% sure how the Amazon/Zappos relationship is setup but I think it's odd that Zappos isn't mentioned anywhere in this or AFAIK anywhere in there investor documents. Does anyone now how Zappos is performing since being acquired? Especially with all of the controversy with their management styles? To be fair I'm sure Zappos is probably a small part of Amazon's revenue, but as a Las Vegas native I'm interested.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#119
post #83
post #70

Earlier 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.

Alibaba.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#120
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We got a price reduction for DVD rental. However, we use Lovefilm-1DVD-without-streaming, because streaming does not work reliably for us. Amazon streaming often stutters and hangs. For comparison, Youtube works great.
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