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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#581

Post by paxys »

taeric wrote: post #575
kevstev wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This begs the question of if things are better today. For shopping, is it?

Absolutely. If you know what you want to buy, it takes seconds to find the absolute cheapest place on the internet to buy it. Then it's up to you to decide whether you trust the site or not. Brand name helps with perception, but definitely not discovery.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#582

Post by herpderperator »

xibalba wrote: post #458
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> 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…

> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". 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.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-chose-comp...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#583

Post by hartator »

teh_klev wrote: post #569
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> 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…

>> 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". This seems like nitpicking. Lots of projects start out with long forgotten names. I'm involved in one that's pretty successful, but you can see from the code base the name evolved over time (~15 years). Codenames and attempts at product placing in the market evolve, stuff becomes myth or…

> This seems like nitpicking.

I don’t know if it’s nitpicking. If it’s true that the Amazon #2 employee took time to post this here, Jeff Bezos should have remembered and be precise in his speech.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#584

Post by mark-r »

rrdharan wrote: post #176
ses1984 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all those things the only two uniquely amazon are cloud computing and fast shipping.

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..

And Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. History doesn't look on him any less kindly for that.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#585

Post by [deleted] »

techlatest_net wrote: post #213
ignoramous wrote: post #70

> 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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#586

Post by avereveard »

snowwrestler wrote: post #498
kevstev wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

early on you went to directories

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#587

Post by gonehome »

easton wrote: post #258
mywittyname wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is doing quite well under Cook. Same with Google under Pichai. Microsoft had some pains during the Balmer years, but I think that's partially due to the anti-trust suit making them gunshy and Balmer being a generally poor choice as a tech CEO, but they are doing very well with Nadella. I expect Amazon to be as ambitious as ever. Though, I am slightly afraid of a shift in focus towards AWS over retail. But I sus…

Google isn’t doing all that well under Pichai, they haven’t launched a successful product under him since Chromebooks (I guess GCP, but when you are that size and . It’s possible that Google is only ever going to be an ads company, but based on their corporate rhetoric I don’t think that was the goal. Apple Silicon Macs aren’t really raking in cash yet, but Mac sales are up $1B in the last quarter, so by time transit…

Yeah, I think Cook and Apple are doing well.

Google is doing poorly, but they have a monopoly on web advertising. If they lose that they'd be in trouble. They also weren't doing better when lead by Page (Google+ era).

Microsoft was on the path to irrelevance during the Ballmer years and Nadella has pulled off a miracle to save them.

I hope Amazon is more of a Tim Cook story than a Steve Ballmer one.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#589

Post by burkaman »

SllX wrote: post #495
burkaman wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question. I don't think it's possible to convince you in the space of one comment, and if it is, I'm not the one to do it. This is a centuries-old argument with absolutely no expert consensus that seems to get more difficult the more you study the issue.

If you want an easy to read modern political argument you can read Break Em' Up by Zephyr Teachout. If you want a more academic approach I would look up the syllabus of an antitrust course and read some court cases, but different syllabi will probably give you wildly different conclusions. Supreme Court cases from a couple decades apart will give you different conclusions. As I said earlier, there is no right answer, it's about balancing inherently conflicting rights and deciding where to draw the line.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#590

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

paxys wrote: post #581
taeric wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This begs the question of if things are better today. For shopping, is it?

Absolutely. If you know what you want to buy, it takes seconds to find the absolute cheapest place on the internet to buy it. Then it's up to you to decide whether you trust the site or not. Brand name helps with perception, but definitely not discovery.

> Brand name helps with perception

That used to be true with Amazon. Not anymore, not for me. Now I have to decide if I trust and endless array of 3rd party sellers. It is often just easier to buy from a manufacturer’s website since I know I’m getting the real thing and it’s not expired or otherwise screwed up. Maybe I pay a few more bucks, but I’m ok with that for a lot of things. (Exception: books and used)

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