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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#431

Post by ignoramous »

mabbo wrote: post #364
temp0826 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS

Thing is, cbell doesn't make it personal (in any of the calls I've seen). It's about raising the bar. He demands quality, and he gets it. His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point. They think ripping into people is the goal. I've got a project this year that I'm told is on his radar. I'm not terrified. I'm excited, because it means I have to deliver th…

Like you, I don't think those meetings were particularly brutal but merely kept plain and honest, and more importantly, were of great learning value besides being a fantastic demonstration of leadership by cbell.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#432

Post by sib »

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…

Not to be difficult, but how many of those were invented in the past 27 years? Bell Labs is (barely even) a shadow of its former self.

If you want to read a great book about when Bell Labs was really Bell Labs:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSZIWG/

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#434

Post by arcticbull »

andrewjl wrote: post #314
arcticbull wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly rules only exist and matter because of the government. It's pretty obvious that even with them, there's a real pressure for consolidation (and that's efficiency of scale). The natural state of a company is a monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you don't need to worry about getting "re-elected" any more than a despot does. The free society exists only in the space between these two clashing titans.

One of the ideas behind federalism was that government / the state need not have a monopoly on everything. Corporate monopolies usually only persist due to two reasons: regulatory barriers or technological stagnation. Both are solvable.

Sure regulatory capture can entrench interests, but there's no reason to believe that in the absence of regulation one big company wouldn't aggregate every major market and just destroy all competition.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#436

Post by stale2002 »

arcticbull wrote: post #288
Quinner wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. There are many governments that continue to exist by enriching and providing for a small segment of society, and uses force to suppress the demands of the rest of society. A corporation generally doesn't shoot dissatisfied customers. Even in relatively liberal democracies, governments are clearly more beholden to forces o…

> A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice. Efficiencies of scale mean there's a natural pressure towards consolidation. The terminal state is always one blob that owns everything. Once they do, they can smash any new upstarts…

> Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice.

Thats not really true. There are tons of industries out there that are highly competitive, and are not aggravating into a monopoly, and those industries are highly competitive without much action from the government.

Sure, there are some industries that have huge network effects, such as telecom, that have a tendency towards monopolies.

But such industries are not the rule. There are instead many industries where monopolies are not forming, competition is working on its own, without the government doing much to enforce that competition.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#437

Post by px43 »

beowulfey wrote: post #331
SllX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Make your case instead of dropping your groupthink everywhere. Why? And: What is the maximum size a corporation should be allowed to grow? Who gives that permission now?

Well, one way to think about it is to consider what the effect of the growth might be. What good is a corporation doing getting that large? Who benefits from the amassing of so much wealth? Are they acting for the benefit of many people, or are they more like a black hole -- mindlessly absorbing money and growing over time? Certainly if a corporation can grow to get so large, it's hard to argue against it. It becomes…

I like that Jeff has the funds to dump into important projects like Blue Origin, and General Fusion, etc. Projects that have zero chance to be profitable at a small scale, but significant benefits to humanity once things start working.

Elon is probabally the prime example of a crazy billionaire who dumps his wealth into wildly unprofitable ventures to get things done for the betterment of humanity.

Of course most billionaires end up like Larry Ellison, whose only drive seems to be increasing the size of his boat collection. He has every right to be doing his own thing, but it would be nice if there was a way to incentivize incredibly risky projects with a potential for significant public good.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#438

Post by oarsinsync »

kevstev wrote: post #421
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…

I think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something about Pets until google became dominant, you were just as likely, if not more likely, to type pets.com into your browser as you were to go to a search engine. Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important f…

To that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#439

Post by efwfwef »

> As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues. Two high-impact examples: our $15 minimum wage and the Climate Pledge. In both cases, we staked out leadership positions and then asked others to come along with us. In both cases, it’s working. Other large companies are coming our way. I hope you’re proud of that as well.

This, son, is the market at play. Without regulations to raise the minimum wage for everyone, companies are supposed to raise it to compete. Amazon has chosen to raise it for publicity, to compete, or by pure generosity. In the mean time, most American workers are paid well below minimum wage, and the situation is not getting better, I should even say: the situation is getting worse. Amazon has given ammunition for people to claim that see, companies are doing the right thing, all is well.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#440

Post by catacombs »

mmmeff wrote: post #45
catacombs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spend time inside that WaPo newsroom that he loves. Investing in journalism is actually a very good thing.

Definitely. So many tax loopholes to exploit.

Ah, yes. Because owning a news organization, one filled with people who can do investigations, presents numerous opportunities to avoid paying taxes.
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