121–130 of 419 posts
People in tech vastly overestimate the amount of people who dislike Amazon. Your Average Joe could not be happier with Amazon and does not give a second thought to their business practices or worker treatment.
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have you talked to engineers who actually work at Amazon? they aren’t exactly running a tight ship. Market forces can make up for having a dysfunctional culture. This is roughly analogous to the role of luck in personal success- people say “I must have done something right!” when in reality you have far less control than you imagine
I have plenty of friends who are ex-Amazon engineers, and for all of their (valid) complaints about the place (management, incentive structure, culture, etc.), one thing no one has ever complained about was the efficiency and quality of Amazon’s engineering work. The stuff i heard about their internal build systems alone is straight up awe-inspiring, and that’s even compared to other tech giants (which is where i met…
Most companies are not customer obsessed , that's why they fail. Let me give you an example; I've bought a sofa set from Coleman, and supposedly I needed to measure the door, if the sofa can fix or not. Because of the shape of the hallway and entrance, the sleeper did not fix from door. And carrier guys did not want to push further. Luckily, my patio's door was large enough to fit. I've called Coleman and explained t…
I used to work for a relatively large bank that for years didn't even track what customers were calling our mega call centre about. It took them a long time to realize that 25% of calls were password resets because the button was hard to see. They had recently expanded the call centre and all over a hard to see button.
As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…
I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…
A practice neither invented by nor exclusive to Amazon, but they tend to get called out on it often, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
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>other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality . Although…
I think the idea that Jobs had "great taste" is a myth. What he was good at was implementing an all-encompassing product strategy that established Apple products as status symbols. I don't think it's an accident that Apple "arrived" in the late 90s. Why? Because that's when their experience with education enterprise could be combined with the broad marketing lessons to be learned from products like Air Jordans. Apple…
Apple is the only company that has nailed the premium computer. Why?
Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre. Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die. Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations. Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use. I'm trying to…
Why do you need the store to recommend to you what to buy from them next? Obviously the store is only going to recommend content which maximally increases its profits, regardless of whether that content is worth your time or really in tune with your most passionate interests. Buying the book from a shop is a necessary evil (unless you just want to read pirated ebooks from LibGen for free like many Kindle owners are doing now), but for getting recommendations on what to read next, why not look to the numerous internet communities of passionate readers who are not motivated by financial self-interest and may better serve your particular tastes?
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These are all fine and perhaps valid, but it's not a serious conversation until you add this at the top: - Because Amazon has extreme market power and engages in predatory anti-competitive behavior
> - Because Amazon has extreme market power and engages in predatory anti-competitive behavior Sure it does. The American consumer continues to empower it to behave that way because no one other than Amazon gives them what they need. Kind of like how people continue to complain about their cable provider being evil but they don't do anything about it except complain. Want to solve your cable provider being evil? Star…
Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot. The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bott…
> Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces. Market forces are not moral. You don't get a free pass on your actions because you made a bunch of money.
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Really? The parts of Amazon that matter, like retail and AWS, have very high engineering standards.
I have a friend who recently managed to spend 6 months without writing a single line of code, just getting shuffled from team to team (within Amazon retail), going to meetings, being reassigned, but not ever really being asked to do anything
As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…
I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…