"So long, thanks for all the fish"?
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#952Earlier 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.
I knew someone who tried to go to hotmail.com but went to hotmale instead...
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
That does tell us something about the corporate structure though - whilst a lot of people think AWS would be better off being spun out, there's no way you hire the head of AWS as CEO of Amazon if you think that's the direction forward.
Antitrust aside, has there ever been a business reason to split up Amazon? I doubt anyone inside the company ever took that talk seriously.
Their fast growing ad network can be seen as a conflict worth splitting out.
Probably similar or maybe even clearer than Google since more people understand a store selling their own products than Google owning every single step (with huge non transparent and evidently according to TX colluded margins) in the ad transaction, in addition to all the user data, and their own products.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Then there was expertsexchange.com, which was always bound to disappoint one of two demographics.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
The profit motive spurs innovation.
This assumes peopleare only motivated by greed. That's wrong. In the current class climate it would be fair to say that desperation is feeding innovation. Whether peoplecan be a more innovative when they're not desperate, stressed out, overworked, and surrounded by people worse off than them is a fair question but I suspect that's not where you were going. Anecdotally, I'm not a fraction creative or innovative when I…
The conflation of greed and profit is disingenuous.
profit, or economic surplus is a requirement for innovation, doesn't matter if it's private, or public spending, what matters is that day to day costs to operate a business or society at large are met before money is spent on risky R&D.
Every rational entity does this, you take your revenue, and spend it on necessities to sustain yourself (like food and shelter), sustain your income (transport etc), and then only spend the surplus on higher risk items (stocks, vacation, luxury foods etc).
If you were on an island, and grew your own food, I assume you would also follow the profit motive, keeping a healthy excess in production for a drought or taking Sunday off to relax, or fixing your dwelling.
We can have a rational discussion about how a company and society at large distributes it's profits, whether it's internally back to employees, R&D or explicit focusing on shareholder value, or using taxes to fund R&D.
But what I assume most people have a problem with is not economic profit, but prioritizing excessive shareholder profit, over everything else. Using shareholder value as an excuse to ignore the real needs of your employees or customers, or even the long term sustainability of the company.
We also have to remember that value is subjective, and when economists talk about profit, they're talking about something subjective. someone who collects stamps for fun, is profitable if they maintain a surplus of stamps. Just like one might buy GME stock to gain in something like social capital.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is not an especially a sympathetic article to either side, but I'm talking about things beyond the core remit of a newsroom. If Amazon workers strike, what happens if the WaPo Guild refuses to cross the picket line by accepting Amazon deliveries, using AWS, or run articles alongside Amazon ads?
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#957> 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 don’t think naming actually matters. In retrospect it seems important. But names as bland as Facebook and as zany as Yahoo! and as creepy as Tungle.Me have all succeeded.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#958Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually that was very normal for a new Internet user of the time. In the early 90's there was no web as far as the public was concerned so Yahoo (1994)/Altavista (1995)/Infoseek (1994) did not exist yet. For users of the pre-1993/1994 Internet, to use it you had to learn a hodge-podge of protocols and software including UUCP, gopher, FTP, telnet, NNTP etc. since that was the Internet back then. It wasn't until onlin…
And it's been September ever since
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#959Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl will never die at Amazon. So much build and deploy tooling is still glued together by Perl.
Config files! And Gurupa, right?
Gurupa is in KTLO mode.
Config is due to Brazil (and later Peru) requiring it; especially for rebuilds. At this point Config being necessary is orthogonal to Perl.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#960Earlier 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…
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 res…
My favorite search engine at the time was Dogpile. It was a meta search engine that probably did much the same as your desktop software. Usually I could get relevant results out of it more quickly than using individual search engines.