I work at a small software company, and too often our CEO and company will latch onto nuggets from material like this and use it to justify a "swing for the fences", "nothing ventured nothing gained" sort of mindset. All well and good, but they blithely overlook the "we fail all the time" parts, and sometimes we take risks where the potential losses are not easy to absorb, or we don't have the vast resources of a big…
I suspect a lot of the current griping over hiring practices is due to this. Small companies cargo-cult hiring practices from Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook, but they forget that these companies have huge numbers of good applicants who are willing to jump through hoops just for the opportunity to have $BIGNAME on their resume.
I work at a small software company, and too often our CEO and company will latch onto nuggets from material like this and use it to justify a "swing for the fences", "nothing ventured nothing gained" sort of mindset. All well and good, but they blithely overlook the "we fail all the time" parts, and sometimes we take risks where the potential losses are not easy to absorb, or we don't have the vast resources of a big…
Oh god yes. At one company, I'd see an article trending on HN and think, "Oh fuck, some suck-up's gonna email to everyone, and the CTO will publicly pat him on the head for confirming his prejudices."
I honestly don't have the slightest clue how yahoo stays in business. And I don't mean that as rhetoric, either. Other than Bloomberg I don't get where the money comes from. I hope it's not organized crime... I'd probably read a biography of the company out of curiosity.
All I can do is guess, but if you go to their home page take a look at the sidebar. That's a pretty impressive range of services. You can manage your email, buy stuff, check the news, see what's on TV, check the weather. It's AOL but on the web and for non-technical people having one place where you can do everything is probably pretty attractive. Especially if it came set as their web browser home page and they don'…
I think they should do the opposite. Even as a young guy their product is very valuable, or was, but they're destroying it piecemeal, closing the unprofitable services and not realizing that the value came from having all those services in one place.
They need to massively cut costs and write down a lot of their value. Their portal with all their services could easily be a cashflow-positive sustainable business. But because they were once big they're not willing to do what it takes to be sustainable now that they're small; instead they're selling off all the good bits to fund wasteful moonshots.
You have to love this sentence "We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member."
Then Amazon is going to have to become much much better. I live in London, UK and do not use Prime. I've almost stopped using Amazon altogether now. Why? 1. Delivery - For our flat, their network either fails to deliver, mis-delivers or screws up in some other way far more than they succeed. There is no option to choose the one postal service that shines for my property: Royal Mail. Anything I order from Amazon may t…
I actually emailed Amazon asking for other couriers to be an option as I hate everything about royal mail. They "lose" loads of mail, they lie by posting "you weren't in" cards when I'm working from home all day specifically to receive a parcel and if you want to pick up a failed delivery you have to travel at inconvenient times to a hard to get to location. This was around the time Amazon dropped them for certain categories of delivery; I doubt I had much, if any, impact on their decision but it felt good. When I've used other companies I've literally been able to follow the van on a map on real time, and my heart always sinks when having ordered an item and clicked on the tracking button I see "tracking isn't available on this item" as it means royal mail will be involved. They only survive because of being a state monopoly which also benefits from junk mail which they require to stay a viable business.
For what it's worth, Germany also has Prime Video.
Yes, but it's probably also the only justification for paying money for prime. I also use it mainly because it's a requirement for their DVD/Blu-Ray rental service. However that got a massive price increase the last month - so I'm considering stopping to use both. Regarding delivery the interesting thing is that before prime emerged nearly all orders here in Germany were delivered on the next day. Then prime came up…
I observed the same thing in Germany: pretty much all delivery services deliver packages the day after they receive the package, so that for Amazon to achieve 2-day delivery they need to deliberately wait a day before they start packaging a non-prime order. Maybe not so customer-obsessed after all.
I cancelled it because Amazon's abusing their position. Refusing to sell Chromecast and Apple TV, then lying, repeatedly, about the reason when asked? I've been an Amazon customer for 13 years. I was rather annoyed to see them go with the anti-Wikileaks and try to be "sensitive" by banning certain cultural items. But this shows they've zero commitment to selling products customers want. Edit: And it really hurts. Som…
Wow, TIL Amazon doesn't sell Apple TV or Chromecast, but instead immediately suggests their own competitors. For a company trying to replace all retail, that's pretty lame.
Great point. Doesn't this directly contradict his statement of "focus on the customer, not the competition"?
I see this letter as an attempt at vindication for the controversy sparked by the NYT article on Amazon's corporate culture. Jeff Bezos was clearly affected and I see this as a defense of their "distinctive culture". "For better or for worse" that culture got them to $100 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history.
We venerate leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt because they inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest and in favor of the organizations that those leaders own and manage. "We will fight on the beaches" sure sounds inspiring, but if it was my intestines bleeding out onto the sands of Normandy, at that exact moment, it wouldn't have quite the same ring. Yet these inspiring words sti…
That's kind of a ridiculous comparison. Those men didn't fight on the beaches because Churchill made a nice speech, they did it because they could see very clearly what the approaching Nazi army would do if they weren't stopped. Nice speeches from inspiring leaders helped - a bit - but frankly I think things would have worked out the same anyway. We tend to look at Churchill with rose tinted glasses because the Allies won the war, but he got booted out pretty quickly once the war was over for being, essentially, a bad prime minister.