601–610 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that the customer experience of Amazon has declined dramatically in the last few years. Maybe there should be more internal viewings of that video.
Practically have to do backflips to avoid accidentally signing up to Amazon Prime. Dark patterns deployed front and centre.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
1. What the hell is Safari (no kidding he didn’t even say hello).
2. Can I use the Internet Explorer?
Edge now (correctly) accounts for this by... having a big “e”-looking icon and basically otherwise being a skin over Chromium.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
Who cares? It's getting into deep time (internet-wise), memories fade, do we care, I don't despite opening my first Amazon account ~1998. It was called "something", big deal. Not everyone has photographic memories of these things, perhaps Paul does, but wasn't asked to recall those memories. Again, who cares? And they might have worked through twenty other names after Paul left. I'm 54 I would have trouble remembering exact details of important things from 25 years ago, and Jeff is older than me, so give the guy a break, it's likely off of his event horizon until he writes "the book".
> 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…
Thanks for the candid comment :) Also, hello mr famous internet person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
> 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…
Thanks for the candid comment :) Also, hello mr famous internet person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
> 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/
> We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.
1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not "invent" the concept), Alexa is a Siri clone, and so forth.
Only "infrastructure cloud computing" is something there Amazon really took the lead and invented stuff. Not a small thing, but also hardly worthy of the bold claim in the article. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and many other companies seem to have done more invention than Amazon.
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.
Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at hanson-guitars.com.
> 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…
IBM also has 5 Nobel prize winners, but this was different time. I don't think we'll see it again.
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…
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.
> 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…
There's a lot of historical revisionism regarding the early history of corporations. Claiming, specifically, as Jeff did, that 27 years ago (1994) that he had no name for his idea is ... not really true. It's likely true that when he actually started working out what the business might be, he didn't have a name. But who does?
Does it matter? Obviously that depends on your perspective. Probably not much. But it's not even particularly hard to read up on the early history (e.g. Brad Stone's "Get Big Fast"), so memory is not really required.