811–820 of 1001 posts
"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.
Lowest workers for Jeff are just cogs in the machine.
"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.
There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that.
You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative.
A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go work for Amazon, then? Are they trapped by not being able to leave the small towns where Amazon hires? Doesn't sound likely. Could it be that their overall conditions are more or less on par, or quite probably somewhat better than the rest of the industry?
I'm going to call your bullshit and say what I think directly: Amazon is a cheap target for young idealists simply because it's visible, it's fashionable to attack, makes a lot of money overall, and most people attacking it have no idea what's a good pay for that kind of work because they never did that kind of work.
> 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".
"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.
I have some karma to burn, so let's do this again. Underpay compared to what? There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that. You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative. A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go…
> 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…
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/
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And IBM invented the hard drive, (arguably) computer product lines, the relational database, and standardized the 8-bit byte. Pretty sure I'm leaving stuff out. They're not quite Bell Labs, but they're incredibly influential.
I always find it surprising that things we take for granted today needed to be standardized. Like I can't even imagine computers not using a 8 bit byte.
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Amazon did not invent customer reviews.
Could you point me to another merchant who offered customer-readable customer reviews before Amazon? I'm not saying there isn't one, just that when we were implementing them, I was unaware of any precedents ...
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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…
On the other hand if you were in yahoo you were online. Type "books" into yahoo though and you'd be more likely to find books.com than amazon.com as the top page, and clearly "books.com" would sell books, who knows what "amazon.com" sells, something about Brazilian rivers?
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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
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.