Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 12:50 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #539

gnicholas wrote: post #410

> 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…

Amazon was paying less than $15 minimum pretty recently; they changed after Bernie started yelling at them, although I'm sure they figured it was a win-win anyway. Before that I think they had an adaption of the pay scale for higher-earning employees where part of compensation was in stock. But if you're making minimum wage you probably don't want to deal with selling shares, waiting for vesting, reporting taxes etc.…

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #282

rrdharan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

There were data centres before Amazon, but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.

Post by taeric » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

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…

Post by gcheong » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 12:58 AM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #80

ww520 wrote: post #22

Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.

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…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

paulpan wrote: post #108

0zymandias wrote: post #86

The takeover of tech by MBAs continues. It has now happened at the top 4 largest tech companies in the US. We will have Apple (Tim Cook), Amazon (Andy Jassy), Alphabet (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft (Satya Nadella & Steve Ballmer) all taking over from non-MBA founders. Facebook is next in size and has Sheryl Sandberg as COO but don't know if Mark Zuckerberg would ever hand over the reins. Why don't non-MBAs manage to get…

Errr...both Sundar and Satya were software engineers first?