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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#421

Post by kevstev »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

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 for that.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#422

Post by burkaman »

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #366
burkaman wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really possible to give you a citation, it's an opinion, or a philosophy. If you have a different idea of an ideal society, we're not going to cite our way to an agreement.

If you're going to dictate an opinion over an entire social structure, then it better be proven to work. My idea of an ideal society has already been proven to work in the past (look at the Islamic Golden Age). However, many of those in power today won't allow it to happen since it is against their interests.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by "proven to work". Give me any society in the history of the world, and I'll give you a moral framework that makes that society ideal. There is no right answer, there is no reference society we can use as a baseline.

Do you want me to cite some philosophers that try to justify the value of democracy?

> However, many of those in power today won't allow it to happen since it is against their interests.

Is this bad? Can you prove it? The idea that the few shouldn't rule over the many without their consent is a political opinion.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#423

Post by alphabet9000 »

I wanted to read this, I really did, but the Time Indicator stated that it was a 2 min read. I'm sorry, that is too long. I ended up not reading; I simply do not have the time. Perhaps Jeff Bezos can get to the point a little bit quicker, the next time he steps down from a key management position in the future. A 1 min read would be acceptable. Thanks to Amazon for including a reading time indicator, I might have wasted my time otherwise.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#424

Post by granzymes »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #372
Traster wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does tell us something about the corporate structure though - whilst a lot of people think AWS would be better off being spun out, there's no way you hire the head of AWS as CEO of Amazon if you think that's the direction forward.

It buys you time. You tell the antitrust: give us a few more months, we'll find a new CEO and then spin out the company. IMHO.

Has the government filed an antitrust suit against Amazon? It could take half a decade to go from filing to a (potential) final appeal at the Supreme Court.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#425

Post by benatkin »

obenn wrote: post #302
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

Was it ever named “relentless” at some point? I’ve heard that was the original name, relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com.

Now he can make it redirect to blueorigin.com - or not. IDK.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#426

Post by powersnail »

oblio wrote: post #390
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346

Earlier 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…

It depends. facebook.com or messenger.com aren't super memorable. Microsoft also made it work by adding something else next to the name. Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Access.

I feel that the importance of optimizing brand name is over-hyped. A lot of it is retrospective reasoning, arguing why such name is good for popularity after the brand becomes popular.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#427

Post by aidenn0 »

ngold wrote: post #351
trts wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must have turned off the redirect sometime in the past few years. diapers.com also used to land on amazon.com :)

Gotta hedge your bets, but I'm glad that I don't shop at diapers.com.

IIRC amazon bought-out diapers.com; it was certainly some diaper startup that they are accused of using predatory pricing against.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#428

Post by suyash »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

So Cadabra came from Abra-Ca-Dabra is it?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#429

Post by TuringNYC »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #333
biztos wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does AWS have a Sears-type analogue or was that a new concept? Just curious, no agenda, I grew up on the Sears Catalogue.

No, AWS was definitely not part of Jeff's early vision. And as many people have said, major credit to Jassy for making it what it is today.

How early do you mean by early? I remember Amazon at campus recruiting (Cornell, 2000) describing something akin to AWS and LoudCloud came up. I asked what business a bookstore had to do with outsourced computing and recall a fair bit of vision even at the time.

In light of what we now know, I’m the only one who didn’t have sufficient vision...for not pursuing that job opportunity more seriously.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#430

Post by scottyah »

adventured wrote: post #289
rrdharan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

It's definitely not absurd, even if they only deserve a share of the credit. There's nothing absurd about the way Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones. They deserve as much credit as anyone for the services / products we know today as cloud computing and smartphones. The version of the smartphone that took off in sales, took over the culture and has become a human staple globally, was entirely def…

I'm certainly no expert on what makes a phone a smartphone, but it seems like Blackberries with their email and small web functionality really kicked off the movement of phones being able to do more than calls and texts.
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