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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#961

Post by pmiller2 »

Retric wrote: post #661
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655

Earlier 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…

Yes, the earliest directories / search engines worked extremely well in large part because there minimal content. When there where 7 knitting websites they don’t need to worry about SEO. It was only after the users started getting hundreds of results for most searches that search engines needed to worry about filtering and prioritization.

Here's a great example of why search engines started using more sophisticated examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...

People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#962

Post by pmiller2 »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #900
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655

Earlier 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…

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. O…

I don't remember how I discovered my first web site, but it might have been from a computer magazine at the time. Later, I would use Yahoo! as my search engine, eventually switching to Google.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#963

Post by wildfire »

mlindner wrote: post #820
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.

I disagree. Amazon has many times refunded my order in full with a simple call, and for orders internationally they do it entirely faith-based and will send you another version without having to even return the original.

I disagree.

I have had orders where they have refused to refund. When I have later, internally, escalated, they have relented and issued a refund.

There is even a dedicated section (can't recall if on inside.amazon.com or the wiki ) to explain the process of how to internally escalate a bad customer support experience on behalf of your friends and family.

If Amazon (retail) is as customer focused as they claim to be this should not be necessary.

I've been a customer since 2000 and an employee for a while now.

Disclaimer: I hear in the US it is totally different and support is a lot better.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#964

Post by pmiller2 »

What is "Career Choice" in the context of Amazon?

Also, I think the claim to have pioneered "marketplace" might be exaggerated. I would say eBay lead in that department, so, unless Amazon Marketplace was around before 1995, I don't think this is correct. Or, am I missing something here? I think the essential bit is having third party sellers, but Amazon does go to some lengths to make it semi-transparent to buy from a Marketplace seller.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#965

Post by alwahi »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #356
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…

> His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra" True. I've heard (employee #20k-something, joined in early 2008) that the issue with Cadabra was its resemblance to the sound of the word "cadaver".

I sat through a talk by Jeff Bozos where he said the same thing, that to register his company he was talking on the phone to his lawyer and the lawyer asked what he wanted his company name to be and Jeff said Cadabra (telling the audience like Abra Cadabra) whereupon the Lawyer said Cadaver which made Bozo develop cold feet.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#967

Post by hodgesrm »

93po wrote: post #934
hodgesrm wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus... * public cloud computing -- Amazon got it to work in a scalable and secure way. * S3 object storage * Dynamo -- A distributed, key-value store that ended up in products from S3 to Cassandra * Redshift -- First cloud SQL data warehouse with ground-breaking ease of use * RDS -- Cloud relational databases * Amazon Aurora -- Relational DBMS that pushes the log and store into a virtualized, replicated storage laye…

Crediting amazon for "public cloud computing" is pretty ridiculous. Managed VPS services were a thing when Amazon was still a book store. Yes, Amazon's services make things easier and in some instances cheaper. None of it was really inventive, though, and definitely not comparable to the list of Bell inventions.

This can't be a serious argument. Even today there's no cloud provider with the breadth of services that Amazon offers. Amazon didn't just implement cloud technologies like block storage, networking models, and off-board hardware support for virtualization; they created an entirely new programming model on those services.

I've heard the "it's not inventive" arguments like this from companies that tried to compete with Amazon. The one where I worked got creamed.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#968

Post by runarberg »

Green_man wrote: post #625
runarberg wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting also is the company qualifier. To exclude universities from innovations seems arbitrary. Another line of attack is asking how much profit Amazon got from these innovation vs. how much they paid back to the various education systems that produced the skilled labor required. Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.

Or maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.

I mean, you can say you have the fastest Fiat, no doubt someone will point out that Fiats on average are all slow next to a Ferrari. The you can just point out that we are just talking about Fiats, not Ferraries. But that doesn’t change the fact that the having the fastest Fiat is not that impressive given that Ferraries are an order of magnitude faster then Fiats.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#969

Post by pmiller2 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #961
Retric wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the earliest directories / search engines worked extremely well in large part because there minimal content. When there where 7 knitting websites they don’t need to worry about SEO. It was only after the users started getting hundreds of results for most searches that search engines needed to worry about filtering and prioritization.

Here's a great example of why search engines started using more sophisticated examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_... People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.

Whoops. s/examples/algorithms/

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#970

Post by duud »

felipelemos wrote: post #518
MisterTea wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.

And you can't have a copyright in that name, specially if you are selling books.

You could potentially trademark books.com

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-46_8n59.pdf

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