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Upvoted; and thanks for sharing these details. They might be obvious for you, but I had only a limited knowledge of all that innovation happening at Bell Labs.
You're in today's lucky 10,000 ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ) :)
But, for my money, the world is an immeasurably better place for the presence Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
Thanks Jeff!
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without Andy (and AWS), I'd posit that Jeff would just be another regular old billionaire who'd own a sports team, but otherwise folks would not know much about.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Most people have no idea what AWS is, but know what Amazon the consumer business is. AWS is only well known among tech circles.
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If you're going to dictate an opinion over an entire social structure, then it better be proven to work. My idea of an ideal society has already been proven to work in the past (look at the Islamic Golden Age). However, many of those in power today won't allow it to happen since it is against their interests.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by "proven to work". Give me any society in the history of the world, and I'll give you a moral framework that makes that society ideal. There is no right answer, there is no reference society we can use as a baseline. Do you want me to cite some philosophers that try to justify the value of democracy? > However, many of those in power today won't allow it to happen since i…
The end goal is to have a functioning, stable, and just society. Unless we're willing to stick to rules that are proven to work, we're going to keep fumbling and wondering why things are the way they are. I bring up the Islamic Golden Age because Islam places a set of rules which dictate things like government and finance, basically red lines that should not be broken. However, everything within those lines are up to society to decide as it sees fit based on the times.
I don't want to say that Islam is "democractic" because that would give the wrong impression that it is fully in line with the West's current practices. It isn't. However, it has a concept known as "Shura", a form of consultation if you will, that allows society to determine how things are run within the boundaries I mentioned, even including the ruler (but not in the free for all manner how elections are run in the West). It's more nuanced, and it's been proven to work.
You can cite philosophers, and I can also cite philosophers that oppose democracy (again in the Western sense). It won't get anywhere, it's all hypothetical. What I did do is show you a system that has been historically proven to work. Today's system is a fumbling mess and we keep crying about it.
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Gotta hedge your bets, but I'm glad that I don't shop at diapers.com.
Incidentally, books.com was taken early on (say 1990) by an outfit in Ohio. Pre-web, they had a telnet interface.
> 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…
I'm wondering for what else it is day 1, right now.
I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it's not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up.
What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?
> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…
Lol, so your take is that you have a better handle on the history of Amazon than its founder? He is likely referring to a point in time when Amazon was just an idea.
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For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
> 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?
> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…
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…
