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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#891

Post by scns »

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...

I found it baffling, that someone manage to predict how that would work out: https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#892

Post by scns »

biztos wrote: post #886
hehehaha wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is value is the only metric worth looking at?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013895

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#893

Post by burkaman »

SllX wrote: post #709
burkaman wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, this thread is mostly about Amazon, so let's talk about impetus for action against them. 1. Documented examples of Amazon knowingly using predatory pricing to put a competitor out of business, most famously with Diapers.com. Amazon saw them as a "#1 short term competitor", lowered their prices and took a loss so Diapers.com couldn't compete, and then raised prices again once they were able to acquire their compet…

#1: I did some sleuthing, Diapers.com, originally 1800Diapers, LLC and later Quidsi, Inc. after they had expanded into other lines of business started in 2005, and you can read a PR statement from the time here: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2005/06/08/1800diapers-co... From the PR statement, you can see their growth hack: > 1800Diapers also recently added a large selection of very popular diaper bags, also at l…

I think we just have different value systems. For me, even the potential of abusing these powers is enough to break up Amazon, and I see very little reason to hold back. It's like trying to prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons, even though they have a great government and there's no evidence they would ever abuse them.

Basically, Amazon's "right to grow" or whatever is not important at all to me, and I don't see what harm is done by breaking them up. I guess a few executives and large shareholders might lose some money, but everybody keeps their jobs, their products will continue, it just feels as obvious to me as your position feels to you. Corporations don't have rights and are not innocent until proven guilty, there's no need to convict them of a crime. It's like city planning: if the community would be better served by removing a highway and putting in some dedicated bus lanes, you just take a vote and then do it, you don't have to wait until there's a 20 car pileup on the highway to take action.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#894

Post by rrdharan »

adventured wrote: post #289
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..

It's definitely not absurd, even if they only deserve a share of the credit. There's nothing absurd about the way Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones. They deserve as much credit as anyone for the services / products we know today as cloud computing and smartphones. The version of the smartphone that took off in sales, took over the culture and has become a human staple globally, was entirely def…

> Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones

Absolutely. You’ll note that the OP’s word choice was invented - defined would indeed be appropriate and not at all absurd.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#895

Post by polynomial »

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…

What did his lawyer have against "Cadabra"?

Offhand it sounds a bit too close to cadaver for the marketing dept, but what would a legal objection be?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#896

Post by treis »

sharkweek wrote: post #724
treis wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision. Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention. Third great idea was AWS. Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfact…

For fun... what are the major “bad” plays they’ve made? The phone is probably the first that comes to mind. That big MMO they tried to release was pretty bad. I’m gonna try and predict the future and suggest their LotR original series will be bad.

The phone is the most notable miss.

They've also made a clone of pretty much every other ecommerce site without any real successes.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#897

Post by 908B64B197 »

laurent92 wrote: post #516
powersnail wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the importance of optimizing brand name is over-hyped. A lot of it is retrospective reasoning, arguing why such name is good for popularity after the brand becomes popular.

Legend says Steve Jobs told his two cofounders, who were scratching their heads over an innovative name, that if they didn’t find a name within 24hrs he would incorporate as Apple. Which is good enough and no reason to hold up the whole process for a decent name.

It's also in front of Atari in the phonebook.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#898

Post by standardUser »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346
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…

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've always hated the name, though I obviously can't argue against its efficacy. The Amazon river and rainforest are symbolically and literally among the most significant features of our natural world. Now, it's better known as the name of a company that can send us every kind of new junk to replace our old junk.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#899

Post by randomsearch »

adamcstephens wrote: post #415
treis wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could even see it breaking up at some point. Retail, Consumer Tech, and AWS. There's no real tie between AWS and the rest of Amazon at this point. In fact, it might be a liability as competitors of Amazon retail & Consumer tech don't want to use AWS.

I could see it breaking up at some point, when our antitrust regulators wake up to the monopoly that Amazon has become and splits the company into multiple parts.

I think the main reason AWS will breakaway will be that it'll just be so different from the rest of Amazon.

I think (for better of worse) the cloud providers - A/G/M + maybe a newcomer yet to be announced - will come to dominate computing in a way most people do not foresee.

Yes, right now they dominate the hardware provision and that will accelerate. But through that, their services will dominate software engineering, and eventually they will dominate not just IDEs and devtools (hence GitHub purchase and VS Code for MS) but they will define programming languages and even what constitutes programming.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#900

Post by washadjeffmad »

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…

There were manual indexes for sure, but my very first experience with the web was someone excitedly showing me how they could dial in, open this web browser thing, and then... nothing, because they didn't know any websites.

We typed in a few things, but it didn't go anywhere.

I remember he called the browser a "web crawler", which was probably the search engine someone told him to use to find sites. We had no idea.

Otherwise, I have a lot of memories exploring the web by typing in words followed by TLDs and writing down the interesting ones. It was another year or two before aggregators cropped up, copying and returning the first ten results of any manual index.

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