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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#941

Post by ehaughee »

adwn wrote: post #874
ehaughee wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a system/process is not about removing accountability, it's about reducing discretion/cognitive load where it's been identified as risky. In fact, having a system/process in place to point to and say "this individual did not follow the steps/process/rules" makes an unbiased conversation about their performance much more possible.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#942

Post by hrktb »

echelon wrote: post #404
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

They can pay Microsoft.

They do, as far as I know Microsoft has a pretty good hold on retail. Some go with GCP but Google is less “enterprisy” for their taste in a lot of ways.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#943

Post by arcticbull »

hutzlibu wrote: post #805
arcticbull wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strength only comes in numbers.

Not really. With numbers come also internal struggles, that weaken the whole system. Look at switzerland or norway for example. They are small in numbers, but don't get really screwed by big corporations either.

I suspect that's in large part due to their interconnectedness with the European Union. Neither are Schengen countries, or Eurozone countries, but they both participate in the Single Market - and Norway is a full participant in the EEA. [1,2]

Roughly speaking they coordinate on all major rules and policies and practices with the entire rest of the EU and therefore are effectively part of the EU for regulatory and trade purposes.

The UK on the other hand, obviously just wrapped up its Seppuku process of leaving the EU, and we're already seeing the relative increase in their being taken advantage of by corporate interests due to their much weaker position.

Switzerland and Norway take advantage of the power of the EU to push back on corporate interests, and the UK is getting kicked around as its negotiating power just went down by a factor of 10.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/coun...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/coun...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#946

Post by rsync »

rexreed wrote: post #767
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does sound vaguely familiar. Jeff did have a handful of other "name candidates" sitting around, and this seems like one in keeping with the sort of thing he was thinking about. I don't specifically remember it though.

By any chance do you remember virtumall.com?

Cutco ... Interslice ...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#947

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

Also, XEROX. Invented the laser printer, the mouse, and the GUI. Those are a bit more significant than one-click checkout...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#948

Post by AnimalMuppet »

TheTrotters wrote: post #930
newswasboring wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it surprising that things we take for granted today needed to be standardized. Like I can't even imagine computers not using a 8 bit byte.

Some mentioned to me recently that most teenagers may have never used a non-touch phone. It's obvious to them that iPhones and iPads are around and work the way they do. But I still remember first using the iPhone 3G in 2008 and how it felt like magic to control a device with my fingers, to zoom into a photo with a simple gesture. I wonder what technology will make them (and me too!) feel like this. Perhaps an electr…

I remember going to the Expo in Spokane in 1974. AT&T had a booth there, where you could dial the same number on a rotary phone and a touch-tone phone, and it would time you so you could see how much faster touch tone was. As a 12-year-old kid, that was my "meet the future of the phone" moment.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#949

Post by hbosch »

telltruth wrote: post #851
hbosch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I think consistently improving existing products is just as good as, and oftentimes preferable to, creating entirely new products.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#950

Post by filoleg »

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.

>but what happens if e.g. the WaPo Guild takes action in solidarity with an Amazon union?

Luckily, we don't need to wonder, because WaPo has actually posted that kind of an article just yesterday, and it was extremely critical of Amazon's anti-unionization efforts [0]. The article's headline is "Amazon’s anti-union blitz stalks Alabama warehouse workers everywhere, even the bathroom". Even the headline itself wasn't sugarcoated or softened in the slightest.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/amazon-...

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