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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#911

Post by herewegoagain2 »

tlholaday wrote: post #840
herewegoagain2 wrote: post #784

Who was responsible for the decision to not offer help with vaccinations under Trump? I had always defended Amazon, until that moment, when they declared they would let people die for their ideology. Now I am trying to purge Amazon from my life, and it is hard. Much more difficult than Google. I had even started to use their grocery deliveries during Covid lockdowns. Maybe if it was Jeff's doing, and he is gone, I co…

> Who was responsible for the decision to not offer help with vaccinations under Trump? Trump was responsible for that decision, that’s who.

That doesn't make sense. You claim Trump rejected the offer that Amazon secretly made to him?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#912

Post by Mauricebranagh »

Communitivity wrote: post #870
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early days 94/95 people quite often used to type single word domains just to see what was out there. This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)

I remember being on Tymnet and just trying addresses via a program to see if I found anything. Most interesting thing I found was a Fed Reserve address once (did not do anything with that).

I used to work for Tymnet the TEC in the UK :-)

People used to do that on the x.25 network to find interesting sites.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#913

Post by Mauricebranagh »

infermore wrote: post #852
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might be regional our American English Teacher was from the posh east cost and a "facebook" was what she called it.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#914

Post by ciupicri »

jdmichal wrote: post #479
ciupicri wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's customer support is mediocre at best. I tried to buy something from them and the card transaction failed because I had some protections in place. Instead of them trying again, they asked for all kinds of documents to prove the ownership. I sent them a receipt from a local store, but it wasn't good enough for them. I guess they don't want my money :-)

I would never take a receipt as proof of card ownership. If I were to find a wallet, what's the chance that there's a random receipt stuffed in there along with the card?

The receipt wasn't old. It was for shopping done after they asked me for proof.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#915

Post by afavour »

smhg wrote: post #786
afavour wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdotally, I disagree. I recently contacted their support when I didn't understand why final ordering prices slightly differed from the listings on Amazon EU websites. The reply was very on-topic, ridiculously customized and clear for an otherwise complicated topic (reason: VAT is calculated on the shipping location within EU). Almost as if someone with real EU accounting knowledge had taken the time to investigate…

I don't deny that Amazon are capable of good customer service. But the site is full of fake products and fake reviews. Returning a product is a breeze but I'd really rather not have to be returning them in the first place. And Amazon knows about the problems. A few times I've reported receiving an offer for a gift voucher in return for a positive review of an item I bought and they've taken zero action on it.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#916

Post by astura »

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 :-)

No, definitely not a thing at "all US high schools."

I can believe it's a thing at really posh high schools though.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#917

Post by OrbitRock »

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…

And nowadays if you’re trying to search something related to the Amazon rainforest Amazon.com stuff comes up first...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#918

Post by chx »

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…

If memory serves, we started searching on AltaVista, moved to Northern Light and then to Google. Certainly directories played a role but really, AltaVista / NL was the bees knees.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#919

Post by catacombs »

morelisp wrote: post #839
filoleg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WaPo has publicized quite a few articles critical of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, even after WaPo was acquired. So this is something that seems to be just another baseless "jeff bad" take.

The questions shouldn't focus on what he lets get printed - we still live in an age where journalism seems to have minimal consequences no matter the quality - but what happens if e.g. the WaPo Guild takes action in solidarity with an Amazon union.

> The questions shouldn't focus on what he lets get printed

Bezos has no say in what can and can't be published.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#920

Post by jdwithit »

rusk wrote: post #854
jdironman wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Heh, was about to post this one myself. My buddy got in big trouble in the high school computer lab making this typo. I wonder what percentage of domains in the late 90's were simply "adult" sites trying to capture traffic via typos. It certainly felt like a lot.
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