Email from Jeff Bezos to employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#621

Post by arp242 » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

colonwqbang wrote: post #299

WitCanStain wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A for-profit corporation seems like a terrible candidate for such a position.

Consider all the horrors that large nations have inflicted on this world. You might conclude that they are an even worse fit for the position. In my country it is illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel. The same cannot be said about Amazon Prime.

It's not like corporations really have a better track record. Quite a few of the colonisation efforts were done by corporations or under private management (not "nations"). Corporations hid and obscured facts about asbestos, smoking, climate change, etc. for decades. Various corporations are not exactly well known for their excellent treatment of people in various less well-off regions (Shell in Nigeria, Dole in South-Africa, etc.), abuse of monopoly positions has a long history, and when corporations really screw things up it's up to the nations to provide some sort of relief (1930s, 2008, housing crisis in various countries).

"Illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel" seem like small fries.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#622

Post by 93po » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

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…

And Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#623

Post by arp242 » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #470

colonwqbang wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I'd rather not say, although you can probably figure out from my post history if you really want to know 2) Yes

Arguably, this could be the UK to some degree, given that if you have a TV, you're expected to pay for a "TV license", the funds of which go entirely to the state run broadcaster.

It's not mandatory to get a TV license, but they will harass you and strongly imply you're a fraud if you don't get one. You can fill in a declaration stating that you don't need one to make the harassment go away for a year. I refused to do so out of principle and eventually I got a letter saying they "opened an investigation" in to me, but I never heard more about it. shrug.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#624

Post by hooande » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

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…

I was at that Startup School lecture in 2008. I still have strong memories of his body language and affect. He wasn't at all what I was expecting

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#625

Post by Green_man » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #594

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.

Or maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#626

Post by safog » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

somethoughts wrote: post #114

It will be interesting to watch how Andy Jassy as head of AWS (dealing with building out data centers, SW partnerships, API uptime, negotiating with Intel, designing Graviton CPUs, etc.) will be able to transition to such things as Prime Video content licensing discussions and goal setting for Whole Foods and the nuances of warehouse distribution labor disputes. As a founder of Amazon - having built Amazon from nothi…

I think it'll be more like Jassy saying: Dave (Clark), make sure retail top-line grows x%, profitability grows y% and keep an eye on Walmart.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#627

Post by DickingAround » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #312

SllX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Make your case instead of dropping your groupthink everywhere. Why? And: What is the maximum size a corporation should be allowed to grow? Who gives that permission now?

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…

I think the problem is that it's not obvious why getting super big is bad. Anti-trust is a law around abuse of customers by cornering a market. But what if they haven't abused customers? What if they treat customers really well and otherwise provide a lot of value? Why stop them from becoming that big?

(It is a big company, but I also appreciate being able to order on-demand compute, or getting like a hundred million things in under a day delivered to my door)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#628

Post by cachvico » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #606

sib wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

There are quite a few caveats with all of the items he lists: > 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…

Indeed, 1-click remains the most egregious land grab of the web yet.

"I'm going to patent shopping".

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#629

Post by willhslade » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

milchek wrote: post #614

maverickJ wrote: post #85

Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone. When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders c…

I'm curious, what was the reason for starting with books?

There are a million titles, so no physical store will be able to compete with a warehouse. There are no refrigeration or unusual logistics with books. They are fungible: generally speaking, one book is as good as another, identical book.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#630

Post by SllX » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #589

SllX wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question.

Sure it is, if there is a good convincing case, you can in the space of a single comment at least get me to seriously question and re-evaluate my priors, check out your book recommendations, and I would do the rest from there whether I ended up agreeing or disagreeing in the end.

Let’s start with what is the impetus for action? Inaction is easy, it’s the default, but if my Representative (presently Pelosi) or US Senators or their eventual opponents and/or replacements trotted that line about how a company shouldn’t be able to get this big, out without an attempt at a good explanation as why we should cap the size of a corporation’s growth, I would throw them from the average politician column into the crazy column. Not just because they are taking that position, reasonable people can disagree, but because they would be seeking power on that position and they would be seeking an expansion of Federal power and action with that position without justification, without a limiting principle, frankly it looks arbitrary and capricious like an imaginary line that exists only in their mind that no company’s market valuation must ever cross without consequence.

The political will to power that led to the anti-trust legislation, prosecution and conviction wasn’t that the defendants were merely too big for their britches; it was their abuse of a market dominant position that it was argued harmed the public. Even today reasonable people can disagree on whether this was a justifiable course of action on the part of the government, but I am not here to re-litigate historical events.

Is the present position of Amazon and its close peers and the other >$100B companies as measured by their market valuations, not market share, not cash and other assets, but present market valuations, equivalent or like to the situations in the past where the government was willing and able to successfully pull the trigger of the antitrust gun? To reiterate, what is the impetus that we must act given the facts that we have about these contemporary corporations with such immensely high valuations?