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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#411

Post by maverickJ »

tomcam wrote: post #228
maverickJ wrote: post #85

Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone. When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders c…

I was there as a developer and a consumer. I don’t remember anyone laughing at him for selling books. It was an obvious play to most of us.

There were those who saw his play. However there was another group of people that wondered the Amazon approach at that time.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#412

Post by oconnor663 »

oblio wrote: post #390
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the future of internet business. It said it needs to be more memorable. You aren’t going to buy your books on Books.com you are going to use Amazon. Turned out to be very right. And this was in the pets.com era. Everyone thought you needed the most generic name po…

It depends. facebook.com or messenger.com aren't super memorable. Microsoft also made it work by adding something else next to the name. Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Access.

Fwiw, a "face book" is a thing you would get at Harvard (and Yale and presumably lots of other schools too but I'm not sure), kind of like a yearbook but at the start of freshman year instead of the end. So for the earliest thefacebook.com users, the name was actually familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#413

Post by GraffitiTim »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #238
kaszanka wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon did not invent customer reviews.

Could you point me to another merchant who offered customer-readable customer reviews before Amazon? I'm not saying there isn't one, just that when we were implementing them, I was unaware of any precedents ...

My memory is there were some stores that had "customer reviews" before Amazon, but they were all screened by the company before being published. So every product would only have 5 star reviews.

When Amazon came out with real reviews, it seemed crazy to many at the time -- like why would you want to share bad things about your products on your own website? I thought it was awesome.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#415

Post by adamcstephens »

treis wrote: post #349
paxys wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say AWS + first-party products and services (Prime Video, Echo, Kindle, Grocery delivery). I can definitely see their pure retail business take more and more of a back seat as time goes on.

Could even see it breaking up at some point. Retail, Consumer Tech, and AWS. There's no real tie between AWS and the rest of Amazon at this point. In fact, it might be a liability as competitors of Amazon retail & Consumer tech don't want to use AWS.

I could see it breaking up at some point, when our antitrust regulators wake up to the monopoly that Amazon has become and splits the company into multiple parts.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#416

Post by twobitshifter »

ignoramous wrote: post #70

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. Jeff's pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM > The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while. Here's Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUy…

Thank you for sharing the video. I liked seeing Bezos on startup phase. I had not heard the story, so I learned that he started as a quant on Wall St and left that job to start Amazon later in life. Many people expect tech startups to happen in your college dorm room, but Bezos took a completely different route.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#417

Post by the-dude »

GizmoSwan wrote: post #272
paxys wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill gates is still renting. What does that mean?

He rents big boats for holidays rather than owning one which the feature of being retired or semi-retired billionaire.

If it floats, flies or , rent it.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#418

Post by adamcstephens »

missedthecue wrote: post #99
DoctorNick wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will he stop immiserating the warehouse workers that work for them?

a living wage (as defined by the internet's favorite vermont politician) is immiserating?

Amazon just settled with the FTC for stealing Flex drivers’ tips. Likely that’s just the tip of the iceberg in their screwing over the people who make their products move.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#419

Post by rajansaini »

wheybags wrote: post #368

> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia: > Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and othe…

Didn't Yann LeCun do important work on CNNs there as well?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#420

Post by spullara »

abhiyerra wrote: post #397
obenn wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it ever named “relentless” at some point? I’ve heard that was the original name, relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com.

I thought it was endless.com that also redirects to Amazon.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless.com
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