521–530 of 1001 posts
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And here is the video from 1999 [1] showing his obsession with customer which is why customer support is in the DNA of Amazon 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o
I think Amazon's search quality going down the drain lately. Too much's been taken by promotions.
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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.
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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 satisfact…
> 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. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think they made these moves because of altruism. They do pay their warehouse employees more than some warehouses, and people talk about changing jobs to work at Amazon because the pay is better. But they also…
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People argue companies like Walmart don't want to pay their rival Amazon for cloud hosting, but the truth is if AWS is the best cloud provider, it makes business sense to go with them
At the scale Walmart operates - 25th largest GDP in the world if considered as a nation[1], supporting over 2.2 Million employees[2], in over 27 countries[3] - it's simply more cost effective to do your tech in-house. Amazon is huge... but Walmart is truly massive... over double Amazon's size in just about every metric. They clearly have the resources to handle things on their own. [1] https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/del…
(6000 employees in 2018, per wikipedia)
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Corporations are not legally obligated to put profit ahead of everything else. That's a bad myth that refuses to die. There is absolutely no substance to that claim. There is no legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.
I don't know of anyone claiming it's a legal obligation. It's a natural obligation, and it's worse. The shareholders want profit maximised, and with that end, decide upon the board of directors, who decide upon the CEO. If the CEO does not maximise profits, the CEO will not remain the CEO. Therefore, the CEOs of (publicly-traded) companies are obliged to maximise profits – those who do not feel such an obligation are…
“ Keep inventing, and don’t despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass. It remains Day 1.”. - Jeff Bezos
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And here is the video from 1999 [1] showing his obsession with customer which is why customer support is in the DNA of Amazon 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o
Do people do any analysis anymore or do they just repeat memes? i.e. "we put the customer first". For reference, I'm someone who hadn't used amazon (i'm in Australia, and I've just had no need). These holidays was my first real experience with the amazon brand and the amazon website. What I saw was an incredibly user hostile site: reviews mashed together from all over the world, and you can't even be sure whether the…
Competitors have gotten better at many of these, but it's still hard to impossible to cancel orders many other places, and if I have to chat to Amazon they still refund and replace things very easily.
I have used amazon.com.au and noticed the selection is pretty bad there. amazon.jp is great though, and worldwide shipping is amazingly fast. The customer service is even more important there because Japanese companies hate cancelling things or special requests (omotenashi/"Japanese customer service" means you do what they tell you, not the other way round.)
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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…
I think the whole pets.com and travel.com is just the usual marketing logic at work and not really related to the limitation of search engines. Its just shady marketing tricks, a bit like how we see the .biz and other gimmicky tlds today.