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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#781

Post by eneveu »

jasoncrawford wrote: post #477
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra" True. I've heard (employee #20k-something, joined in early 2008) that the issue with Cadabra was its resemblance to the sound of the word "cadaver".

I heard the same story (I joined in 2004). The version I heard was that Jeff was driving cross-country NY -> Seattle and was on the phone with his lawyer about incorporation papers, and the lawyer misheard “Cadabra” as “Cadaver”. That's when Jeff knew he needed a better name.

Indeed, Jeff talks about it in this 2001 interview : https://youtu.be/p7FgXSoqfnI?t=7m05s

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#782

Post by progval »

mr_toad wrote: post #282
rrdharan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

There were data centres before Amazon, but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.

> but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.

I believe Grid5000 did it before Amazon [1].

It opened in 2005 and allowed users to automatically book hardware (with OAR [2]) and install their own images (with Kadeploy) on dedicated hardware.

[1]: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/History [2]: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Getting_Started#Reserving_resource...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#783

Post by Corrado »

noncoml wrote: post #707
paxys wrote: post #52

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…

I just hope Andy Jassy will not bring the AWS customer support to retail, because Amazon is screwed if he does.

Nah, its just that you'll have to change your perspective of customer support. Any questions will be answered in 5 days by pointing to the FAQ and each response will take an additional 5 days. If fact, you'll probably find the answer yourself before support helps you. Finally, the feedback mechanism will be so generic as to be useless.

Unless you want to pay 10% of your order for expedited service. Then those days drop from 5 to 3.

/s

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#784

Post by herewegoagain2 »

Who was responsible for the decision to not offer help with vaccinations under Trump? I had always defended Amazon, until that moment, when they declared they would let people die for their ideology.

Now I am trying to purge Amazon from my life, and it is hard. Much more difficult than Google. I had even started to use their grocery deliveries during Covid lockdowns. Maybe if it was Jeff's doing, and he is gone, I could justify continuing to buy from Amazon. But I guess not.

Interesting that many say AWS is the actual business of Amazon, and they may get rid of the rest. It seems to me AWS would be the easiest to replace, after all, there are lots of cloud standards. Can't you just take your Docker images and publish them somewhere else?

It seems much more difficult to me to replace the aggregation and efficient logistics. In fact I don't see any competition.

Now that they want to see me dead, I want to see Amazon dead, but I have little hopes for it.

Their achilles heel might be trust - online reviews are almost completely broken now, and complaints about fake products are rising. Their answer to the latter seems to be to steal successful products and sell them as "Amazon Basics", but that is evil and also won't work for having "everything".

Another issue could be people returning their stuff or even damaged goods. I see a surprising number of people who have no ethical qualms about returning things they already used or that are broken.

Maybe the future will be to buy directly from producers? That seems to be the only way to avoid the fake products? So someone should come up with ways to make it easy for producers to sell their products online, or at least provide a chain of trust.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#785

Post by mvanbaak »

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 had bought a product on amazon.de, it arrived with some cosmetic damage (product worked, little scratch). To be honest, it was one of the best customer support experiences I had seen. Select order, select product, click button 'problem', describe what the problem was, get return info, DHL picked up the next day, two days later I had a replacement product.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#786

Post by smhg »

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.

Anecdotally, I disagree. I recently contacted their support when I didn't understand why final ordering prices slightly differed from the listings on Amazon EU websites.

The reply was very on-topic, ridiculously customized and clear for an otherwise complicated topic (reason: VAT is calculated on the shipping location within EU). Almost as if someone with real EU accounting knowledge had taken the time to investigate and reply (which I can't imagine?). And this was from a non-business account. It was easily one of the top-3 customer service experiences I ever had.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#787

Post by dialamac »

codezero wrote: post #771
hnlmorg wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

No idea what you’re talking about. There was the run up to the communications decency act and obscenity prosecutions but these were far more risky for the peddlers, not the consumers (and some were prosecuted). There was the old hilarious CP80 initiative by the Mormons (with a nice tie-in to the SCO v Linux debacle) but that never had any serious legs to stand on. Meanwhile discreet billing for naughtiness predates the internet and was especially notable in the days of 900 numbers - assuring discretion was pretty well stated. Considering that child porn was essentially legal and you could walk into adult stores in broad daylight on Times Square not too long ago I think you are misremembering things or probably too young for context.

What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#788

Post by gambiting »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #590
paxys wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. If you know what you want to buy, it takes seconds to find the absolute cheapest place on the internet to buy it. Then it's up to you to decide whether you trust the site or not. Brand name helps with perception, but definitely not discovery.

> Brand name helps with perception That used to be true with Amazon. Not anymore, not for me. Now I have to decide if I trust and endless array of 3rd party sellers. It is often just easier to buy from a manufacturer’s website since I know I’m getting the real thing and it’s not expired or otherwise screwed up. Maybe I pay a few more bucks, but I’m ok with that for a lot of things. (Exception: books and used)

It's always interesting to me how people on HN almost universally have such poor experiences with Amazon. I've had over 200(!!!) orders from Amazon last year alone and didn't have any problems with any order. In fact when my guaranteed next day delivery was late by a day they just gave me a month of prime for free.

And every time I decide to buy directly from the manufacturer I get punished - bought a Lenovo laptop around September, laptop turned up with a broken screen. Took over 3 weeks to get Lenovo UK to replace it and it was an exercise in absolute frustration, I could write a small essay about it. I was so upset at myself for not buying it from Amazon - I know if I did and had the same problem I would literally have a replacement posted to me the following day without having to fill out a dozen forms and spend hours on the phone with customer support.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#789

Post by thecupisblue »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #295
warent wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity has it ever seemed to you that Amazon's success changed Jeff? Or has he always been largely the same person you knew from the start?

I haven't communicated with Jeff for more than 20 years. His public persona seems largely consonant with the person I knew 27 years ago.

I'd imagine you'd pour beer with him and tell old war stories. Why not say hi? I bet he'll have more time for it now :)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#790

Post by piva00 »

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…

> I could gopher topics by early 90's

So you weren't a normal, mainstream, new user to the internet. You knew how to use it, you knew where to go to search.

I was the same in the 90s (minus Gopher skills), I learned about Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. and became a wizard to my friends and some relatives because I could find things on the internet, didn't need to know the website address beforehand or click somewhere in AOL.

It did exist, it just wasn't accessible and generally available, nor it was a tool people knew how to use.

So domain names up to the early 2000s were pretty important to capture the mainstream market, not the Gophers.

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