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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#871

Post by iorrus »

u801e wrote: post #595
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…

> the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. It wasn't as good as google is now, but search engines of the time did allow for discovery.

I thought it was much better back then, you could find niche sites that were of interest.

Google seems to have banned all the interesting wild content that made the internet so fascinating in its early days. Blogs seem to have disappeared completely for instance and I have to specify the site to search to find anything e.g. site:Reddit.com

However it does have an amazing ability to find comments on stackoverflow relevant to my needs based on a few keywords.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#872

Post by vegesm »

piva00 wrote: post #790
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somewhe…

I remember my school ran a contest where you had to find obscure information on the net. Things like when the inventor of the saxophone was born? You had to submit an URL so using the library was not an option. It was insanely hard, nowadays it's just one wikipedia click away.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#874

Post by adwn »

ehaughee wrote: post #748
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…

The key mental shift (for me anyway) is that if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed. You need to design a better system when the flaw in the system is the people. What that often looks like is changing/instituting processes such that quantitative measure (metrics, checklists, etc) governs decisions (thereby removing much, but importantly not all, of the human…

> if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed.

That just means that the person who designed the system deserves the blame.

I'm only half-joking here. You can't just rely on the "system" – someone needs to be responsible, either for the decision or for creating the system that makes the decision.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#875

Post by mabbo »

paxys wrote: post #393
hintymad wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a rare opportunity that someone smart can "rip me apart" for the right reason. Candid truth does not hurt. It stimulates growth. In contrast, the worst place is where everyone is nice, but does not tell you what you have done wrong.

Candid truths can be shared in blameless postmortems and a hundred other ways. An executive shouting at someone in a large meeting is an ego trip, nothing more.

I listen to the calls weekly. No one shouts. No one degraded others. Cbell's power is that he doesn't have an ego in these calls.

The blameless postmortems are reviewed in these meetings, and the findings challenged, to ensure they really got to the root cause and lessons are learned.

I once almost got to present my post mortem, but it wasn't high enough priority that week. I wish it had been. It would have been ripped apart, but I would have gotten the feedback from the smartest people in the company on how to make my system better.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#876

Post by sbarre »

adventured wrote: post #335
sbarre wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that America is a terrible example of government and governing, and that you shouldn't be using it as a comparison in your argument. Good government is hard, but it's certainly better than a corporation that is legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.

Corporations are not legally obligated to put profit ahead of everything else. That's a bad myth that refuses to die. There is absolutely no substance to that claim. There is no legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.

Sure sure, you know what I meant.. Legally in the sense that for _most_ companies, if they don't prioritize profits, they can potentially face shareholder lawsuits, or management gets ousted and replaced by the board, etc..

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#877

Post by dreamer7 »

Alupis wrote: post #465
airstrike wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People argue companies like Walmart don't want to pay their rival Amazon for cloud hosting, but the truth is if AWS is the best cloud provider, it makes business sense to go with them

At the scale Walmart operates - 25th largest GDP in the world if considered as a nation[1], supporting over 2.2 Million employees[2], in over 27 countries[3] - it's simply more cost effective to do your tech in-house. Amazon is huge... but Walmart is truly massive... over double Amazon's size in just about every metric. They clearly have the resources to handle things on their own. [1] https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/del…

Yet, Walmart seems to rely on GCP and Azure for atleast some of their cloud requirements

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#879

Post by gxqoz »

mmmrtl wrote: post #566
gxqoz wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of institutions in the Seattle area that have pretty good generic domain names, presumably because of the tech connections in the area. For instance, the Washington State Fair has the domain thefair.com.

Local zoo is zoo.org!

Oh yeah, forgot about that one.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#880

Post by breakfastduck »

danellis wrote: post #370
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…

> It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time I doubt that he started out imagining he would build the world's biggest cloud hosting platform or open the first chain of checkoutless grocery stores.

The internet - the only place you can find a snarky comment doubting the validity of a statement made by the actual 2nd ever employee of Amazon, who knows infinitely more about what Jeff Bezos wanted to achieve than the doubting commenter.
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