651–660 of 1001 posts
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Thanks for the candid comment :) Also, hello mr famous internet person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
Oh wow JACK and Ardour are awesome, didn't know about the Amazon connection
Ah, for the day someone figures out the Amazon of funding open source software...
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In retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision. Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention. Third great idea was AWS. Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfact…
We are firing on all cylinders And yet, reviews are still horribly broken and have been for years. Also counterfeit products and books are everywhere on the site. Amazon is going to have to fix those hugely important things before I'll buy the Kool-Aid that they're "firing on all cylinders", which is just CEO pep talk.
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no need to set a max. Just set the marginal rate so high that earning (or, if a wealth tax, owning) more than some amount becomes pointless.
And disincentivize people from working? That's not a sustainable economic system. For a properly sustainable system, consider how Islam solved this problem over 1400 years ago. Zakat is the only form of "tax" if you will that is mandated. Interest and other predatory practices are prohibited (e.g. shorting). Once the fundamentals are correct, everything else naturally falls into place. It has been reported that durin…
I enjoy reading your discourses in support of Islaamic economics. Do you have a blog, email or social media account?
Wa salaam.
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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
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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…
I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's.
I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers.
Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available.
Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exist, but new-comers would have a steeper learning curve. Today, it is expected, nay, demanded as a human right to be able to search the entire internet from a uniform and single klick search box. (yes, old crotchety, "in my day..." :) )
(edit: misspelurating stuffage)
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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
Do people do any analysis anymore or do they just repeat memes? i.e. "we put the customer first". For reference, I'm someone who hadn't used amazon (i'm in Australia, and I've just had no need). These holidays was my first real experience with the amazon brand and the amazon website. What I saw was an incredibly user hostile site: reviews mashed together from all over the world, and you can't even be sure whether the…
In the past five years, every visit to Amazon involved wading through ads for bad products (eg, search for Iphone7, see sponsored ads for Samsung phones). There are more sponsored line items than actual results.
Prime’s price has almost doubled and I had 6/25 packages take longer than 2 days in the last year I had prime (compared to 99-100% for the previous 15 years).
One click doesn’t work because if I try it, I get charged for shipping even though free is available. I have to manually go into every over and uncheck 1-day shipping for $5.99 (or whatever) and select free 2-day. Every time. And I have to click through a screen to manually say I don’t want to buy prime.
Amazon sucks now. They abandoned their customers.
Comically, Walmart has a better (easier, faster, less bullshit, cheaper) experience than Amazon. I never would have guessed.
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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.
This is, frankly, a very silly thing to get hung up on.
First of all, I assume you mean you have to make some payment that goes to that channel, not that you're forced to watch it.
Second, this means you're essentially passing a presumably small tax that is earmarked for that channel.
In other words, it's not any different from all the other taxes: paying them is part of life in society, and you're never going to agree with all their uses.
I bet there are far bigger items in your government's budget that you disagree with.
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?
> 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…
Was it ever named “relentless” at some point? I’ve heard that was the original name, relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com.
It was public knowledge that Bezos stopped running Amazon day-to-day a while ago. It was headed by the two execs under him (Andy Jassy for AWS and Jeff Wilke for retail). Jassy even had the CEO (of AWS) title. With Wilke announcing his retirement a few months ago, Jassy was the clear frontrunner to take over from Bezos. In hindsight I guess Wilke retired because Jassy was picked over him. The timing of the announceme…
Yes, a bit of shakeup at the top. Jassy now CEO, Dave Clark stepping into Jeff Wilke's role as head of retail. I assume Charlie Bell will step up as head of AWS.