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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#641

Post by SllX »

tovej wrote: post #618
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.…

You are confusing a whole lot of concepts here, and at times it seems you are arguing against yourself(?). First you argue against great concentrations of capital also being great concentrations of power, in this "yes, but no" sentence: >Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power. This sentence seems to mean absolutely nothing. "not equivalent to power" is some sort of vague semantic argument about what…

Power takes differing and subtle forms: political, electoral, military, obligation, legal, sexual and official (as in the power practiced by an office holder). Monetary power is precisely one type of power, it is powerful, but is not power’s only form. Everyone has a price, except when they don’t. Is a billion dollars enough to make up for the loss of your son? What about a trillion? Only if the value you placed in him could only be measured in money.

> You then talk about the market cap of Amazon. Why? The market cap, while also representing a sum of money, is not really relevant to the discussion. You even seem to realize this yourself, but you do not really explain the reason for bringing it up.

You’ve lost the thread. Let me help:

============

>>> I still remember when Amazon was only selling Books. People laughed, Media Laughed, and I guess most of us laughed.

>>>Amazon is now a ~$1.6 Trillion Dollar Company. What an era.

>> For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand.

>> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc.

>> 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?

===================

> Amazon exhibits all these forms of power and more. Some of the other companies you mentioned exhibit these as well. It would be in the interest of society to break up monopolies and other concentrations of power that are actively impeding competition in the way that Amazon is.

Sure, they exhibit power, they use their power, but is it actually too much power? We can use any measure you like that isn’t market cap, now that we’ve re-established the thread and where that came in. Pick your measurements, and demonstrate how they show that Amazon is too powerful, not merely powerful.

> These ideas aren't new, developed nations typically create institutions to maintain healthy competition.

As a general rule, although not a hard rule, I don’t have nice things to say about the laws of other nations. Your task is much easier leaving them out of it.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#642

Post by burkaman »

DickingAround wrote: post #627
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…

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…

I guess it's similar to arguing against a benevolent dictatorship. And I don't mean that to be snide, I think if I met someone living under a truly benevolent dictator I would have a very hard time explaining to them why I think it's a bad and dangerous form of government.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#643

Post by fuzzfactor »

lnanek2 wrote: post #251
unethical_ban wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with the premise that "representative government is the union of the people" and "profit motive is not always the best incentive for action in society", and go from there.

What about starting with the premise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" whereas a successful government organization "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more". Which is doing more good for the people? I've worked for both and know which I'd choose.

A successful corporation performs its mission smartly and reliably.

This may or may not include specified behaviors, tasks, growth, marketing, sales, profits, goods, services, employees, competitors, etc.

Even corporations without any shareholders are common, found in the non-profit sector, but you do need corporate officers regardless.

Would it be better if there were a couple non-profit corporations with one or two million employees each the size of Amazon or Wal-Mart, to go along with what we have now?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#644

Post by logicchains »

arp242 wrote: post #621
colonwqbang wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sout…

>It's not like corporations really have a better track record.

The governments of Russia, Germany and China killed over a hundred million of their own people last century, no corporation comes anything near that.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#645

Post by solidsnack9000 »

arcticbull wrote: post #288
Quinner wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. There are many governments that continue to exist by enriching and providing for a small segment of society, and uses force to suppress the demands of the rest of society. A corporation generally doesn't shoot dissatisfied customers. Even in relatively liberal democracies, governments are clearly more beholden to forces o…

> A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice. Efficiencies of scale mean there's a natural pressure towards consolidation. The terminal state is always one blob that owns everything. Once they do, they can smash any new upstarts…

As a practical matter, without government to to enforce contracts and protect IP, most of the monopolies we've seen over the last ~120 years or so would never have existed. There would not have been much to MSFT if software piracy were a nonissue at the corporate level.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#647

Post by dialamac »

felipelemos wrote: post #518
MisterTea wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.

And you can't have a copyright in that name, specially if you are selling books.

Names are not copyrightable in any case. You mean trademark.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#648

Post by asdefghyk »

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…

In about 1994 I recall the aim was to find a good page of links to whatever topic interested a person.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#649

Post by xyzelement »

paxys wrote: post #393
hintymad wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a rare opportunity that someone smart can "rip me apart" for the right reason. Candid truth does not hurt. It stimulates growth. In contrast, the worst place is where everyone is nice, but does not tell you what you have done wrong.

Candid truths can be shared in blameless postmortems and a hundred other ways. An executive shouting at someone in a large meeting is an ego trip, nothing more.

Blameless is often pointless because sometimes something about the person is the problem. If the project failed because Bob ran it and Bob is too risk averse, then you can't fix it without talking about Bob. Bob either needs to figure out how to be less risk averse (hard and time consuming journey) or Bob shouldn't run projects that require risk taking.

Doesn't mean Bob is bad or gets fired, but he is part of the picture.

The whole blameless thing is so weak - if there's something about you that caused the failure, don't you want to know?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#650

Post by garyrob »

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…

They did NOT pioneer personalized recommendations. Believe me, I know, because out-of-the-blue I got a phone call from Jeff Bezos back in the day, who was interested in my pre-existing recommendation technology. They didn't have any. In the end they got it from a company called Net Perceptions. Eventually they built their own, but the technology was firmly established all over the place by then.
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