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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#491
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store…

There was competition. Bookstacks.com had been in business with a telnet-only interface for more than a year before Amazon. As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn't see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).

My understanding was that it was also about the long tail. With millions of titles in print, and a minimum selection of thousands to make a decent bookstore, you can't print a decent catalog and mail it. Before Amazon, the biggest mail-order books business was the Book-of-the-Month Club. Perfect case for an online catalog.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#492
post #466
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" at the time became so popular due to the word 'Internet' compared to a 'Netscape'. So many non-technical people just thought that was the 'way in' when they bought their first PC.

Is that the real reason? Being bundled with the OS as the default browser for 95% of all computers seems like a bigger driver!

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#493
post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

I'd guess that Bezos's genes are pretty well baked into the company.

With Jobs, it sounded like there was a singular personality role that was a chaotic influence in the company. That wasn't the only thing that made Apple great, but were people throughout the company inspired to be more like Jobs?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#494
post #432

> 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/

Jeff said

> I don’t know of another company

He didn't say contemporary company.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#495
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?

Because money is power, corporations are not democratic, and putting so much power in the hands of one person or a handful of people is dangerous to society. I would also refer you to the entire history of US antitrust law, which will be hard for anyone to summarize in a comment. The whole field of competition law is a question of how to balance the rights of those running a business with the rights of those affected…

You’re going to have to try harder than this.

Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power.

Amazon is valued at $1.6T and this is a calculation that directly correlates to how much individual shares of Amazon. Shares can be sold for money, but this decreases the share of power the shareholder has by the exact amount of shares they sold to the buyer, which increases their shares and power over the company. The act of buying and selling shares affects the stock price which can increase or decrease the market valuation of Amazon.

If Amazon were a lone behemoth sitting on top of the stock market and second place wasn’t even close, I think you would have a stronger case.

Checking literally thirty seconds ago, Amazon isn’t sitting up there all by its lonesome, it is the bronze medal with Apple and Microsoft sitting above it, Apple up above the $2T barrier, and Google lagging pretty closely behind at 1.3T.

Now these market valuations will be a bit different tomorrow, or next week, or next month, but none of this is literal money in the bank. Money in the bank comes from the products and services these companies sell.

They are also both cooperators and competitors with each other and companies like Facebook ($761B), Walmart ($395B I think it was) and Adobe ($232B).

The power they can leverage from these assets is immense, but it is in competition with other motivated actors who are throwing more actual cash around.

If we do nothing, it is likely there will be more trillion dollar companies this decade than the ones we are discussing now, some of those will be in different market sectors altogether, and some of those will be competitors, and some of those will be semi-competitors.

Companies with far less cash than this already lobby for their interests in places like the Capitol, and the amount of money they’re using to successfully (and unsuccessfully) lobby is measured in the low millions, not the billions, and certainly not the trillions.

So what exactly is the problem that reducing the size of these companies valuation and theoretical power supposed to solve? How does this benefit society? Is society being harmed by Amazon at $1.7T or Apple at $2.2B? Is the problem their size or their practices?

Break this down. It’s easy to say “no company should be this size”, it’s a lot harder to say why, and I am not convinced yet. There’s plenty of people in the PRC with billions, and that hasn’t stopped the PRC from soliciting them for “voluntary” contributions, so maybe lots of money < lots of guns and a big Army in the overall economy of power.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#496
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is false, right? It's only taxable on exercise. That or I know 1,000s of people at major companies that owe back taxes.

In the 1990s, I knew dozens of people who faced major financial problems because they immediately owed taxes on options they had just exercised, on shares that were not tradable. These were just regular developers (or in some cases, shipping crew), and they didn't have $50-500k sitting around to cover taxes like that. Maybe the rules have been changed since then? I do know that by the early 2000's there were financia…

This is the difference between RSUs, NSOs, and ISOs. ISOs don't make you pay taxes until you exercise it (a qualifying event), which means you actually took this piece of paper and converted it into tangible value. I'm not sure how they could have exercised it and not had it turn into cash (perhaps their company got acquired and they got options of another non-IPO'd company?).

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're you writing Perl primarily back in those days?

Perl got used for some backend tasks. Nothing related to the webserver.

Perl will never die at Amazon. So much build and deploy tooling is still glued together by Perl.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#498

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…

Early search engines were pretty dumb and heavily weighted on keywords, which a generic domain name helped with as well.

Again, less of an issue now with more intelligent search engines. (Although strong brands still tend to a get a lot of traffic via searches on their name...)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#499

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…

The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.

In retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision.

Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention.

Third great idea was AWS.

Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfaction.

Also TBD are the media plays (Twitch, video,music,.etc.). Not clear if they will ever make money.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#500
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is true even if there is no public market for the shares at that time (something that caused headaches for many early dotcom stock option grantees). It's is an obvious precedent for taxing somebody who has "received" wealth via the route that Bezos has done.

> When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is false, right? It's only taxable on exercise. That or I know 1,000s of people at major companies that owe back taxes.

I only know Canada where one owes taxes when an event occurs. Being issued stock is not an event. Exercising options for stock is an event.

IANAL nor an accountant and this is not financial advice.

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