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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#591

Post by acvny »

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…

Probably `Cadabra` came from `Abracadabra`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abracadabra

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#592

Post by toyg »

TMWNN wrote: post #522
oarsinsync wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.

You have too much trust in people's wholesomeness. We all know the internet is for pr0n ("...so grab your d##k and double-click...").

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#593

Post by redthrowaway »

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…

>ps. amazon employee #2

Please tell me you held onto your stock

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#594

Post by runarberg »

wheybags wrote: post #368

> 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…

Worth noting also is the company qualifier. To exclude universities from innovations seems arbitrary. Another line of attack is asking how much profit Amazon got from these innovation vs. how much they paid back to the various education systems that produced the skilled labor required.

Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#595

Post by u801e »

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…

> the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users.

It wasn't as good as google is now, but search engines of the time did allow for discovery.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#596

Post by toyg »

devlopr wrote: post #544
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that era pretty fondly and I don't ever recall just typing in random URLs, except maybe jokey ones like sex.com or fuck.com for kicks. We had Yahoo's search engine at the time and worked well enough. And to a lesser extent Lycos/Hotbot/Inktomi/DMOZ. The pre-Google web was pretty interesting and a bit more sophisticated than gets credit today. I also feel you were less likely to discover retailers on the we…

It was really common to type in random words as domains expecting something. People would make mistakes so people would buy domains with common spelling mistakes.

Browsers also tried to autocomplete as www..com (and .net and .org, iirc) and send you there if it resolved. At some point they switched to sending you to search engines instead, but i bet there are flags somewhere in Firefox' bowels that will still do that for you if you really want.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#597

Post by II2II »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346
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…

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 wonder how much that was linked to trust? People were leery about online shopping in the beginning, and a name like books.com sounds a little too generic.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#598

Post by taeric »

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.

Right, but if you knew to that level of specificity back then, search was just as good in most places. Now, selection was lower, somewhat obviously.

As then, though, if you are not specific or willing to lean on a name brand, search is effectively broken.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#599

Post by SilasX »

kayoone wrote: post #127
s3r3nity wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - the man is 57, and at this point does NOT have to work anymore...probably for the rest of his life. Looks like he still intends to run his philanthropies, Blue Origin, and the Post, but after the type of run he has had, he's probably taking some more free time while he's healthy. I try not to fall into the "cult of personality" trap, but Amazon is where it is _because_ of Bezos, and it'll be fascinating to wat…

> at this point [he] does NOT have to work anymore...probably for the rest of his life. that was already true a long time ago, you don't need to be one of the wealthiest people on the planet before you don't have to work anymore.

Yeah that was true by the time of his 1999 interview on 60 minutes, when the interviewer joked about him driving a cheap Honda:

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/this-jeff-bezo...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#600

Post by kart23 »

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…

I'd argue Pixel has been pretty successful for them.

Nest and Fitbit were decent acquisitions, Google as a whole is doing ok.

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