I bet this, the 982nd comment, is as boring as all the others. How can there be things to say about one man's email to his staff?
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#972Earlier 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…
Did “just as likely” imply to you that search engines didn’t exist?
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#973"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.
I have some karma to burn, so let's do this again. Underpay compared to what? There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that. You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative. A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go…
You did not have to wait long for another "Amazon is evil" article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/amazon-...
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#974Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you consider that everyone is born into a quasi-feudal arrangement where they owe fealty and taxes to a country culture and government they didn't choose, and the only choices of leader are limited to those willing to climb the greasy pole of politics - typically self-selecting sociopaths.
This is unfortunate, but it's also an invariant of human behaviour. The alternative is to get leaders through inheritance, which isn't any better. So the best thing to do is to try to nudge the system in a direction where the worst tendencies are mitigated: build institutions in which non-sociopaths can thrive politically, and allow a reasonable path for outsiders to join the political process. The US in particular i…
The alternative is to get leaders through inheritance, which isn't any better.
I refuse to believe that is the only alternative.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#975Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok fine, but in your original post you don't provide any dates, and you assert that: > It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". Now you're saying something different. So it's one thing or another. Maybe just clarify the "when" of these things as you remember them. Not having a go at you.
This seems like nitpicking. Especially because "Amazon" being chosen in '94 doesn't mean Cadabra wasn't the name it was chosen to replace. How is Paul "saying something different"?
Registration for Cadabra was filed in July 1994. I suspect this was chosen because Bezos' attorney had discovered that his first preference "Abracadabra" was taken.
Amazon was a much better choice.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#976Earlier 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.
"declined" is a major understatement. Too many practices at Amazon is now decisively anti-customer: - Fake reviews have been happening for years but almost no progress from Amazon - Huge number of fake products and/or misleading specs - Sponsored products trumps organic results every time - Sellers use whatever brand they wish instead of their real names giving appearance that they are "official" vendors of that bran…
I stopped buying much there around ~2010. The sheer amount of Chinese counterfeit garbage and lack of proper categorization makes it impossible to browse the site. The clothing category in particular is just 100,000 dumpsters full of unlabeled trash heaped into a pile.
If you didn't discover a product name somewhere else, you won't find it on Amazon. Amazon doesn't do merchandising for shit.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#977Earlier 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
Imho the September was really kicked into overdrive with smartphone and mobile Internet adoption facilitating the social media hype.
Prior to that people would at least need to sit down and dedicate attention to whatever they were doing online at their desktop.
It required at least some technical base knowledge.
While nowadays pretty much everybody can, and will, pull out their smartphone even during very short breaks: It' all short attention span, relegated to devices were multi-tasking is way more of an hassle, which means people are also way less likely to do research on whatever they are discussing.
It's gotten to a point where in many places writing anything longer than Tweet length is considered something bad, as most peoples attention span just can't cope with long-form forum posts anymore.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#978Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet Explorer became popular because it was bundled with Windows.
At the time, IE was also dramatically faster than Netscape Navigator, because it wasn't just bundled, it was built in.
Was it really faster? I think IE had faster start-up time, since some of the components were loaded along with Windows boot, but I don't think it was faster overall.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are quite a few caveats with all of the items he lists: > We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. 1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not…
I think we should not discount "Prime's insanely fast shipping". That is an amalgamation of several innovations and has truly changed the world. Of course, all this if Amazon has actually invented that and I am not just misinformed.
> truly changed the world.
Some parts of the continental United States, mostly in large coastal cities.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
In some ways content was more discoverable back then. There was less of it, and it was objectively harder to get it online thus making the quality higher for the stuff that was there.
Plus Web Directories, and Link lists where IMO better than keyword searches. They allowed you to find and follow topics faster.
The explosion of content and google has made discovery harder unless you are one of the Top sites or platforms. All it takes it being on one of them, not being a good quality content.
Want to sell a widget, you better sell it through amazon because chances are Google is going to index those results as the Top Results not your webstore. Even manufacturers that want to sell direct have to also have Amazon stores because the Amazon listing is the one of the only ways to get a top search spot