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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#771

Post by codezero »

hnlmorg wrote: post #761
codezero wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should add that as I understood it the business model was that sex.com resold front page space to affiliates that were relevant to the search terms that led to their paid listing being listed higher for a particular keyword. That’s how they could afford to bribe/partner with portals/search engines pre-Google. For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’…

Pre-2000 porn was a wild ride. You were never more that 1 click away from crashing your computer under the weight of a hundred pop ups!

And the implicit threat of your bank “outing” you via the transaction if you try to cancel. I may be misremembering but I felt like there was a good chance what I was viewing legally may end up suddenly illegal with the way online legislation was going in the late 90s, and I’m talking just like laughably soft core stuff by comparison to today, and that permeated the online porn business and kept it seedy for a long time.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#773

Post by arcticbull »

basilgohar wrote: post #169
arcticbull wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "get this big"? Governments aren't defined by a market cap, but rather by the services they provide to their citizens. Consider that a private company's only goal is to enrich its shareholders, and they have no responsibility to the people or places around them. They are only accountable to their shareholders and the government. A governments responsibility is solely to its citizens who also contr…

That's a pretty narrow definition of a government. I hardly think that's been the case for most of history and I don't think that's actually the case in the majority of nations to date, even at the surface.

Curious what definition you would use? Beyond the obvious, monopoly on the use of force.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#774

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

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.

Amazon’s secret sauce is in their operational efficiencies and logistics. AWS is great but utility computing conceptually it’s a mainframe bureau from the 1970s.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#775

Post by nytesky »

obenn wrote: post #302
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…

Was it ever named “relentless” at some point? I’ve heard that was the original name, relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com.

I believe Bezos was a huge fan of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition; so it could have been homage to that.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#776

Post by rob74 »

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…

Yeah, that quote is management hyperbole at its best. I wouldn't even call what Amazon does "invention", maybe "innovation" - but Ok, you have to call it "invention" if you want to patent it, like the (in)famous "one-click patent".

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#777

Post by jacobolus »

closeparen wrote: post #736
Aperocky wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad that as soon as AT&T gets to commercialize the lab it ran it to the ground. Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful. That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit b…

Bell Labs levels of excellence don't normally show up in projects that are just for compliance or government relations. This can't be the whole story.

For an idea about telecom monopolies, read Tim Wu's book The Master Switch.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#778

Post by rob74 »

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…

> 1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO

Well, it is according to the US Patent Office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent), and unfortunately that's the only opinion that counts in this case (at least as far as the US is concerned)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#779

Post by eloisant »

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…

This, also search engines used to give a lot of weight to workds in domains so if you searched for "book", the search engine was likely to give you books.com as first result.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#780

Post by ImaCake »

Corrado wrote: post #754
afavour wrote: post #230

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.

I don't know, I just returned a faulty smart light bulb and the process was beyond easy. Just select it from my previous orders, submit a request to return it, and choose how to send it back. Pretty easy. As a "bonus" I was able to send it back through a Kohl's store so my wife got a 25% off coupon that she used to purchase some masks and socks (and stuff). Yes, I know, they got us to purchase more stuff, but she rea…

My anecdata counterfactual to this is that I recieved an empty package and couldn't even figure out how to make a complaint to Amazon let alone return it. It was a cheap item so maybe they care more if it passes some threshold value?
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