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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#21

Post by MCRed »

icebraining wrote: post #16
stingraycharles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (…

But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?

Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old.

Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft.

There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned.

It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.)

Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#22

Post by MichaelApproved »

nabaraz wrote: post #10

I thought having local service providers would be cheaper. So I compared some of their prices with Walmart and Best Buy. TV Wall Mounting (my won mounting bracket): Amazon: $229, Geek Squad: $149.99 Tire installation Services (2 tires): Amazon: $69, Walmart: $12 each Car Stereo Installation: Amazon: $120, Best Buy: $64.99 I think there is a large market for local listings (e.g. Angies List, Groupon Local etc) but the…

The Amazon guarantee would go a long way with me. Something goes wrong, I don't have to worry about battling it out with the contractor. I call Amazon and let them deal with it.

I can't say it's worth double the price until I actually need to use one of their services but I would definitely accept a premium for the hassle free service.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#23

Post by MCRed »

icebraining wrote: post #16
stingraycharles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (…

But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?

Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old.

Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft.

There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned.

It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.)

Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#24

Post by piyushpr134 »

rplnt wrote: post #17
flyinglizard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to…

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

You have been droned

Re: Amazon Home Services

#25

Post by minusSeven »

MCRed wrote: post #19
flyinglizard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to…

It's an idea that is DOA. It will never work because it will never be economical, nor safe. If you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize it's a joke-- like an April Fools joke.

do you mean to say drone's are more expensive than people ?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#27

Post by caractacus »

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #3

Amazon can now let me hire a goat herder[0] to get my lawn eaten down. Is there anything they can't sell? [0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UBYDXXQ/ref=vas_sf_GoatGrazing

Simply there to grab publicity. Someone in marketing this heard the word 'viral' and read about Goat Simulator and something clicked.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#28

Post by techsupporter »

gchokov wrote: post #20

Really hate when web sites assume you live in the US. Don't make me click around menus and finally ask for US Zip code (And don't assume Zip codes have 5-digits only).

> And don't assume Zip codes have 5-digits only

Aren't ZIP (it's an initialism, Zone Improvement Plan) codes by definition a US-only thing? Even in countries that don't call them post/postal codes, they're not known as ZIP codes.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#30

Post by MCRed »

dkyc wrote: post #5
MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup . They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away.

Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook.

Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business.

They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever.

I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company.

If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either.

My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result!

Company is pretty much a joke.

I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)

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