Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Home Services

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 247 posts

Re: Amazon Home Services

#101

Post by toyg »

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…

The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive.

To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, where rain and strong winds are common. I think the evolution of airplanes (which "we" believed would soon replace cars, back in the '20s) showed the problems we will always have with flying: it's a messy affair at the best of times.

I applaud Amazon for its faith in robotics, but I'd argue that we're more likely to get self-driving vans (which will either carry a very relaxed delivery guy, or will let people like supers open van doors with a code), or other incremental disruptions, before we see a wide deployment of delivery drones.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#102

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

Same could be said about Google, except Google gets a dedicated userbase and then shuts the service down.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#103

Post by gchokov »

cheetos wrote: post #73
ChristianGeek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never run across anyone in the U.S. who refers to postal codes as zip codes.

You must live in a different U.S. than everyone else. It's clearly the other way around. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:usps.com+"zip+code" returns 120k results https://www.google.com/search?q=site:usps.com+"postal+code" returns 372 results

To be honest, everyone should refer to these as postal codes or at least address codes. No one refers to the ZIP code as Zone Improvement Plan code anyway.. so what is the use of these code in the real life?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#104

Post by jasonlotito »

MCRed wrote: post #30
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.

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…

> I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti,

I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless of what else you have to say, this type of commentary is what hurts conversation. Clearly, you are wrong about the culture of HN.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#105

Post by brudgers »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #22
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.

Putting tires on a car is a commodity service of the sort that if something goes wrong the biggest problem isn't getting a full refund. With construction there's still a messy contract that needs to get sorted out, and Amazon is charging double the going rate to maintain a reserve for often having to mobilize a crew twice. They have to because every building contains a different bag of hurt buried in its walls. The people who are experienced enough to reasonably predict what's buried are unlikely to need to give Amazon a cut because they are already busy.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#106

Post by ceejayoz »

makeitsuckless wrote: post #85
nknighthb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon.com is their US site. If you're there, you've effectively walked into a store in Seattle. If you want a store not tailored to the US market, you'll need to visit one of the sites they've made for other countries (where this is probably not available yet).

> Amazon.com is their US site. That's exactly the problem. .com US Initially this kind of behavior was "quaint" and amusingly "typically American". But in 2015 it's just f-ing annoying.

> But in 2015 it's just f-ing annoying.

So's complaining about something that's been the de-facto standard for 2+ decades.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#107

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Home Services

#108

Post by dangrossman »

Looks like they took all the contractors offering home service deals through Amazon Local (which has been running for 4 years in 36 states) and turned it into a service menu instead.

Which is genius.

I've gotten a leaking toilet fixed, leaking roof inspected and patched, garage door springs replaced, and a noisy heater tuned up at fixed prices by buying "deals" for them through Amazon Local when I needed something done.

The experience is a million times better than finding a new contractor in the yellow pages for all these kinds of jobs. So many of them now charge a "service call fee" just to come out and do a quote, and won't quote even simple jobs over the phone. If their quote is too high, you've just thrown away money (and wasted half a day) without getting the problem fixed.

I am super enthusiastic about what Amazon's doing here and hope they stay in this market. Looks like I'll finally be putting in that exhaust vent in the bathroom that doesn't have a vent hole cut.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#109

Post by ghaff »

practicalpants wrote: post #49
minusSeven wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Their drones could easily be $30k+ a pop, and if they crash, need maintenance, irretrievably fly out of range, or simply become targets of angry people wanting to break them... all problems frequently encountered with high grade hobbyist drones.... then their value vs. an employee is questionable. Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost,…

If the basic drone delivery model were viable, it seems to me as if today it would be viable to have a Kozmo 2.0 sort of service in urban areas. It might have higher labor costs (not at all clear as you could use pretty low wage workers) but it would have a whole lot less capital requirements and we know how to do it today. I guess Amazon is doing this in a very limited way with Amazon Fresh.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#110

Post by robotnoises »

bederoso wrote: post #67
MCRed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Could you expand a little on how Amazon does stack ranking in a more palatable way? As a consumer, I love Amazon, but I have heard a lot of horror stories first-hand from an Amazon employee about this very thing.
Post reply on HN