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Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

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Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#51

Post by heavyset_go »

pmiller2 wrote: post #41
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?

> It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it.

Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#52

Post by krustyburger »

pmiller2 wrote: post #41
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?

So much of the result of a search is now explicitly advertising. Amazon now has a new incentive to sell ads and display those ads as often as possible, whereas before their only goal was to return relevant results to the customer making the search.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#53

Post by recursivecaveat »

m-ee wrote: post #31
SamReidHughes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now get photos of my package when it was delivered.

I gave up and moved entirely to using the lockers when I order from amazon now. Curiously they still managed to lose a package between the last distribution center and their locker. But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring…

I had a package shipped to a locker. Delivery date comes and I get a notification that the driver couldn't complete the delivery because the location was inaccessible. Perhaps I "locked out the mailbox" the email says. I call them up to ask how I supposedly locked them out of their own locker, which is in the middle of a public mall. They assure me the driver will "try again" tomorrow. The status goes back to in-progress, then "location inaccessible" again, and finally "package damaged" a couple hours after. I don't know whether it was always damaged, or it got damaged in the process of not delivering it, but neither is a good look. Amazon automatically refunds me, presumably so I stop messing with the delivery time average. How its possible to screw up what's essentially an internal shipment so bad I don't know.

I went to buy it from the manufacturer's website instead. Ships without trouble right to my apartment, and I don't have to worry if I'm buying damaged goods, a knock-off, or some garbage. Someone is doing some terrible Pinto-style calculations, shaving pennies here and there while losing pounds building a delivery network that gets 'most' packages 'somewhere', 'most' of the time.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#54

Post by celticmusic »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
celticmusic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

That hasn't been my experience at all, but the further point is that is all background stuff. They can improve the search without changing the UI, so it's not really a response to my point.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#55

Post by omikun »

jariel wrote: post #27
remarkEon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.

There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price. Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era. Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the…

Selective memory? Google made this thing called Android. What was Microsoft doing?

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#56

Post by nine_k »

manigandham wrote: post #30
RijilV wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the integration. AWS is just quietly milking the cash out of retail and funding the science projects.

Retail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.

Retail as a business is fine.

Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books.

It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#57

Post by Apocryphon »

hitekker wrote: post #45
pm90 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along. I was nodding along until this line. The fact that you would phrase it this way makes it hard for me to trust whatever you said earlier.

A throwaway proclaims, without evidence, that their employer is a paragon of virtue and its victims are liars, miscreants, criminals etc. A predictable pattern.

This would be a cynical baseless insult, if not for the fact that Amazon has engaged in exactly such underhanded whitewashing behavior:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#59

Post by blululu »

paxys wrote: post #13
neffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade. The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews. It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China. Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all chri…

Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.

Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#60

Post by minblaster »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
celticmusic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

"Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?

Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

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