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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#851

Post by telltruth »

hbosch wrote: post #175
ianai wrote: post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

Apple and Microsoft are arguably much better off today with their new leaders than they might've been. I don't see your point? I think Facebook, too, could use a new face at the top as a matter of fact.

They are not. On the surface revenues keeps growing, profits are enormous but underneath there are virtually no new product lines. If you look at Microsoft of 1990s, there were new $1B business each year - MSSQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics etc etc. For Apple, Jobs made it a point for one new product line every 2-3 years. For Google, you had new stuff like Gmail, Maps keep coming. Now its mostly barren land. Amazon had a lot going on with Alexa, pharmacy, Fire tablets, prime video etc. Don't expect these stuff 2-3 years down the road with new business suit at the helm.

There are real impact of not having a "product person" at helm. Business suits will squeeze out revenues and profits no matter what but there are no more tech that truly leap frogs existing art.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#852

Post by infermore »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #825
oconnor663 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, a "face book" is a thing you would get at Harvard (and Yale and presumably lots of other schools too but I'm not sure), kind of like a yearbook but at the start of freshman year instead of the end. So for the earliest thefacebook.com users, the name was actually familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

Its a thing in all US high schools - so for US searchers it would be very obvious Back in the 70's in the UK one of our American teachers mentioned then in our general studies class when we where doing America one term - she refused to show us her entry :-)

It's definitely not a thing in all US high schools. I'm pretty sure yearbooks are the thing most US high schools have.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#853

Post by telltruth »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #379
ianai wrote: post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

Big difference: Andy Jassy is an execution machine, AND has a really good sense of vision and strategy. AND has worked at Amazon for ~25 years. Source: my humble opinion, and I worked at AWS and met him several times.

Looks like a typical MBA business suit to me. Could you elaborate on vision/technical aspect? I'd think he would delegate those to others.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#854

Post by rusk »

jdironman wrote: post #848
Zsolt wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I had the chance to use the internet I typed in "whitehouse", hit enter and whitehouse.com loaded. It turned out to be a porn site, the teacher saw and I got banned from using the internet - in 40 seconds.

White House was the first time I ever seen porn / naked women. Cue me spending the next 6 months sneaking to load the page on dialup all hours of the day. To be a kind again. Now we have TBs of data but tend to be uncontent sometimes.

Anybody ever type alta-vista.com by mistake? The search engine had no hyphen, this address went to something else ...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#855

Post by rusk »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #837
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…

I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot. Google did nothing particularly inno…

Google had the best results by far. I remember around 2000 most “regular people” had pretty much given up on the web. It was google and maybe Napster that got people interested again...

I wonder what it’ll be to fix the Internet this time around?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#856

Post by hehehaha »

telltruth wrote: post #838

It is utterly surprising that even Bezos couldn't resist choosing a business MBA guy as his successor just like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Bill Gates did! They talked ALL their lives about importance of "product person", innovators, disruptors, technologists and derided "business" CEOs. But when it came down to it, they ALL chose the safest possible suit at their disposal to run their ships. Steady as it goes...

But Jassy is not a typical MBA guy. He trailblazed the entire cloud industry.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#857

Post by telltruth »

ksec wrote: post #66

From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…

To me he looks like retiring. Working on new projects while someone else is CEO hasn't worked out well. Ask Bill Gates, Steve Jobs (when Scully became CEO) and Larry Page. Bezos had been buying massive houses and spending a lot more time there. He had been seen with his girlfriend a lot more these days. Before his affair, he barely had time for anything other than Amazon. I think he is done with all ambitions more or less.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#858

Post by mathewsanders »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #837
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…

I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot. Google did nothing particularly inno…

I also used Altavista and Hotbot (although I don’t remember why I could choose one over the other for a certain search).

I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result.

I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#859

Post by divingdragon »

11235813213455 wrote: post #850
Zsolt wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I had the chance to use the internet I typed in "whitehouse", hit enter and whitehouse.com loaded. It turned out to be a porn site, the teacher saw and I got banned from using the internet - in 40 seconds.

what search engine was the culprit?

Some browsers automatically "fix" addresses by appending `.com` for you. I think even Firefox used to do that until mid 2010s.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#860

Post by xyzelement »

hamburglar wrote: post #743
xyzelement wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blameless is often pointless because sometimes something about the person is the problem. If the project failed because Bob ran it and Bob is too risk averse, then you can't fix it without talking about Bob. Bob either needs to figure out how to be less risk averse (hard and time consuming journey) or Bob shouldn't run projects that require risk taking. Doesn't mean Bob is bad or gets fired, but he is part of the pic…

If your root cause analysis leads to a preventative fix that amounts to “humans should not make mistake X” you haven’t done anything to prevent recurrence.

I am not constraining my statement to the narrow set of problems where your statement applies.
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