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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#91

Post by IanDrake »

flyinglizard wrote: post #59
MCRed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll address some points here. 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are bare…

1 - Uhm, not safe.

https://www.google.com/search?q=quadcopter+injury&num=50&rlz...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#92

Post by mcherm »

stingraycharles wrote: post #9
dkyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 (…

> people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?)

I disagree. I think most people know. Amazon was once a bookstore, then it changed; it's now the website where you buy things. If you're in IT it is also the major host for cloud computing.

There it is in a sentence (two for IT specialists). Does this leave out major things like video? Sure, but you asked about the brand, and that seems pretty clear: that website where you buy stuff.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#93

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

pja wrote: post #89
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was "the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com", which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3. This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled. Citation for this lie please. Because parts of your statement here do not really make sense. For instance that S3 was at one point they…

I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? (Fwiw, I’ve heard the same thing the OP says elsewhere.)

> I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon".

I can't even find sources of such a claim at the time the first offering of AWS occurred. The claim has made that as of 2010, 100% of amazon.com traffic goes via EC2 which I believe is likely as it has been mentioned by Amazon engineers.

That AWS was not built for amazon first and foremost has been said from the start. Jeff Bezos himself said early on that why only build it for themselves when they can sell it.

> I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history?

AWS's first service was SQS which launched two years before S3. EC2 launched half a year after S3.

There is a bit of history here: http://jeff-barr.com/2014/08/19/my-first-12-years-at-amazon-...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#94

Post by randomsearch »

flyinglizard wrote: post #58
rplnt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.

> it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason

I imagine safety and power issues, talking to friends who research drone tech.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#96

Post by arnehormann »

flyinglizard wrote: post #59
MCRed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll address some points here. 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are bare…

And what about signal jamming or drones being shot down? Not only for package theft, also to strip or steal the drones themselves? I'm really curious how robust this delivery method is against external manipulation and general human misbehavior. Or say there's a defect - some structural damage - and a drone crashes or loses its 10 kg package into a front screen of a car driving on the interstate. Honestly, I don't see a way this could work. Not because delivery by drone in densely populated areas is economically and technically unsound. Because of... other stuff.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#97

Post by brudgers »

I don't think this is game changing. Home Depot and Lowe's are already in that space and they haven't changed it. The reason is that construction is refactoring and debugging much of the time.

Typical houses are built on the LAMP stack, not Rails. A lot of configuration and many of the conventions embodied are Rick 's and Rick ain't around. There are lots of corner cases built into any structure, and clean quick and straightforward pricing models by necessity come with lots of caveats. There's often a reason a light switch needs replacing that's bigger than just swapping out a part. The old one is still there because replacement was nasty work.

Throw a retail model at this and people expect refunds just because. I no-shit-know someone who had no problem taking back fresh from the ground annual flowers to Home Depot at the end of the season for a refund. The fact that new waste pipes won't work that way is why contracts matter. Good plumbers are busy and paid well, Amazon can't Uberfy them. It's not a commodity skill like driving a clean late model car. Sawzalls are involved and expert experienced judgement is required. They'd do better with web developers because they would nit have to solve the locality problem.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#98

Post by rplnt »

flyinglizard wrote: post #58
rplnt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.

The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. Light drones also can't fly when it's too windy, too rainy, too cold. And they can only carry a very small subset of usual shipments (limited size and weight).

Automated cars on the other hand...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#99

Post by justinsb »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #93
pja wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? (Fwiw, I’ve heard the same thing the OP says elsewhere.)

> I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I can't even find sources of such a claim at the time the first offering of AWS occurred. The claim has made that as of 2010, 100% of amazon.com traffic goes via EC2 which…

Do you not remember yourself how AWS was initially pitched?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#100

Post by bederoso »

LunaSea wrote: post #75
bederoso wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it. Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determin…

The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1... and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.

How does me, a single person and a simple SDE, being defensive (was I being defensive just because I wanted to clear up misconceptions?), says anything about an entire company's culture and image?
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