Email from Jeff Bezos to employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#691

Post by not_knuth » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

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…

Coincidentally, I saw this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671097

Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I could not help but wonder if this was the Usenet post you saw back in the day that made you apply for a job at Amazon :)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#692

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #536

codeulike wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically have to do backflips to avoid accidentally signing up to Amazon Prime. Dark patterns deployed front and centre.

I contacted support twice in 2 years for Prime subscription I didn’t want. Each time: “Are you sure you didn— Yes I’m sure, I knew intended to avoid it, so it’s clearly not me.” Both times they correctly cancelled it.

The system is mostly designed to prey upon inattentive seniors with disposable incomes.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#693

Post by jaredsohn » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #607

devlopr wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a random memory of the website at hanson.com having a banner alerting visitors that the website of the popular late-90s boy band was in fact at hansonline.com, and that you would only find information about guitars made by the Hanson company should you further browse the site at which you currently found yourself. Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at…

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#694

Post by croes » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

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…

And one of Bezos first ideas for a name was Relentless.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#695

Post by usefulcat » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655

kevstev wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmmm... That is not how I remember it. 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 exi…

The fact that you had even heard of gopher would have put you in a very small minority of internet users once dial-up internet access become relatively accessible (so, post-1995ish or so).

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#696

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #679

burkaman wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For one, if you don't like something, you don't get to air your displeasure, find common ground with others who feel the same and then band together to do something about it, say, vote out the people who are the reason for it. Benevolent dictatorships tend to bare their teeth once the spotlight of scrutiny hits them.

The parallels to Amazon's response to unionization efforts are uncanny.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#697

Post by starpilot » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #537

barry-cotter wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.3% of students at Princeton came from a poor family but became a rich adult. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

$180K is like 1-1.5x the median family income in a high CoL area in the US, so that's actually about what in line with what I would expect. You're not poor, sure, but it's not close to the kind of rich the original comment is implying when clubbing him with billionaires. A kid whose family earns $186K/yr isn't exactly on the fast track to becoming the next Jeff Bezos.

$180k is not "working class," period. I don't make $180k and I live in Seattle working in a tech-adjacent field. You claiming that it is is like saying a 14 year old is almost 15 which is almost legal driving age and basically an adult in terms of responsibility, so it's pretty much the age of the majority at 18.

I went to a big state school that was respectable but not Princeton. I still wouldn't say most students there were from the "working class" by the common definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class

> The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work.

How many Princeton kids had parents who worked construction? Plumbing, drywalling, tar roofing? I'll guess: very few.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#698

Post by cercatrova » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

croes wrote: post #694

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…

And one of Bezos first ideas for a name was Relentless.

relentless.com redirects to Amazon.com

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#699

Post by codezero » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

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`.

This is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but those companies insisted wasn't true, so it fit a narrative people liked.

I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines.

That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#700

Post by tootie » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #230

techlatest_net wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

I recall reaching out to the customer service more than once pre-2010 or so and they were incredibly responsive and helpful. I guess they just couldn't scale human interactions past a certain point.