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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#881

Post by nickelcitymario »

hnlmorg wrote: post #750
vishnugupta wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally second this as someone who began surfing web in 1997 as a university student. Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensiv…

People were commonly using Lycos and Yahoo as search engines by 1997. Sure, some of the more exciting content wasn’t stuff you’d think to search for and thus would often get shared via word of mouth (like the “Bert is evil” site that parodied the Sesame Street character in compromising photos...after all, which sane persons would search “Bert +hitler” ?) I think the limited time many people had on the internet (as yo…

> Yahoo! Would have online games, chat rooms, site recommendations and email all accessible from its landing page and it was a similar story for many of the other search engines as well. They considered themselves the homepage of the internet (and in many ways they were right).

Still a winning business model, because this line could easily describe Facebook.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#882

Post by astrange »

lostlogin wrote: post #553
jasoncrawford wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This instantly reminded me of the story about Microsoft posting a dev a dead fish. https://olhardigital.com.br/en/2020/05/23/news/the-strange-s...

This is not the most interesting story about Scott Forstall and Microsoft. Did you know he invented WordArt?

https://twitter.com/natbro/status/1339600779531833344

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#883

Post by BrandoElFollito »

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.

One of the main reasons I use Amazon in France is their service.

I never ever had any issues, our biggest fight was about the 2€ they charged me once to send back a 100€ item. They gave up after the 2nd email.

I will pay 10% more for the Amazon price, for the peace of mind.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#884

Post by julesFromPulp »

efwfwef wrote: post #457
ignoramous wrote: post #70

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. Jeff's pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM > The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while. Here's Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUy…

"this is day 1". I'm wondering for what else it is day 1, right now. I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it's not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up. What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?

Yes cryptocurrencies are one thing but look at the possibilities afforded with having a decentralized, distributed ledger in all areas of life. Having a source of truth in things like law or politics. This would be a fundamental shift for society as a whole not just finance.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#885

Post by julesFromPulp »

93po wrote: post #622
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…

And Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.

Amazon hardware always seems like it has been a means to and end. That end being buying stuff off amazon.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#886

Post by biztos »

hehehaha wrote: post #856
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.

And Tim Cook trailblazed the world’s most valuable supply chain, IIRC. I don’t think the parent was implying these are talentless drones, just that they are the obvious safe choices for succession.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#887

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

vishnugupta wrote: post #726
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 can totally second this as someone who began surfing web in 1997 as a university student. Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensiv…

Speaking of yellow pages, I had an Internet-specific yellow pages, I think it came from an order from Outpost.com. It was a physical book, just like the original phone book.

I think I still have it, and if I can find it I'll reply with details.

It was fantastic for finding things, because you could explore it, and because search was garbage back then.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#888

Post by checkyoursudo »

Zsolt wrote: post #846
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 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.

In late high school or maybe during college, my wife was going to look for something at Dick's Sporting Goods by navigating to a domain that any ordinary person might expect. The result was not what she expected.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#889

Post by kevstev »

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…

As a smart but not necessarily brilliant teenager getting on the web in mid-late 90s- Maybe Christmas 1996 I- well my family really- got a computer that could get on the internet, search engines were mediocre at best. I did have a family friend come over who was an old hand at the internet and knew all the tricks of the day- using operators like AND, OR, NEAR, NOT etc- and he was able to yield much higher quality results, but I was personally never able to replicate his abilities.

Google and Pagerank changed all that, but up until then, it was all very tricky and each search engine had its niche- Yahoo with its directory, Ask Jeeves had a user friendly interface, lycos and altavista had some niches of their own as well that I can't quite recall- or maybe they just each had brief shining moments in the sun. At one point I had desktop software that was a meta crawler that would enter a query into each one. The full text searches on keywords that may or may not really be relevant to what you wanted were really not all that good.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#890

Post by pjmorris »

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.

I once attended a talk by Ron Graham (mathematician who'd once worked at Bell Labs) where he explained that they had applied graph theory to minimize the distance of cable runs to minimize the amount of copper they had to buy.

And, transistors are certainly cheaper and more reliable than the vacuum tubes they replaced.

Economics is still a factor in regulated environments.

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