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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#471

Post by allanmacgregor »

airstrike wrote: post #360
hrktb wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mental image is that people want to spin off AWS for society’s benefits because Amazon grew too big and abuses the integration. Amazon squarely resisting this idea seems uncontroversal.

People argue companies like Walmart don't want to pay their rival Amazon for cloud hosting, but the truth is if AWS is the best cloud provider, it makes business sense to go with them

Been part of some of those conversations, some companies are wary of hosting with Amazon not due to paying their competitor but due to the amount of power they are putting on a direct competitor hands.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#472

Post by burkaman »

woofie11 wrote: post #387
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.

Perhaps. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I'm a firm believer in continuing to innovate and improve governance. I don't think it's just an abstract philosophical argument. These things can be modeled with game theory (cite: The Dictator's Handbook). There are opinions and philosophies about evolution, vaccines, and lots of other things, but at the end of the day, those can be reso…

A discussion about vaccines can be resolved through rational discourse only if everyone agrees that diseases are bad for you. If I think disease is good, you can't convince me that vaccines are good for society, even if we agree on their effects.

That's a contrived example, but this kind of disagreement is very common in discussions about government and society. If you believe that individual choice is important and all humans are born with equal rights, and I believe that individual choice is unimportant and some humans are born superior to others, we are never going to agree on an ideal form of government. We can have full agreement on the facts and full disagreement on what we consider to be a "good" outcome.

You mentioned game theory, but you can't design one model that will satisfy one person who wants to maximize outputs for all players, one person who wants to weight players in different castes differently, and one person who wants to set a hard cap on all players because too much material comfort leads us away from God.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#473

Post by meepmorp »

xibalba wrote: post #458
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…

> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". Lol, so your take is that you have a better handle on the history of Amazon than its founder? He is likely referring to a point in time when Amazon was just an idea.

>> ps. amazon employee #2

You know, there's actually a pretty good chance that he's not pulling this out of his ass.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#474

Post by riversflow »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #334
riversflow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook transition was for Apple. I like Apple, but there is quite a seam with the Jobs/Cook transition. That seam is the overly minimalistic industrial design patterns witnessed in the butterfly keyboard, vanishing ports, trashcan Mac, etc. They seem to finally be coming around on this.

That's because Ive left. The product pipeline is now getting to the post Ive point and you can see a distinct change. IMHO Apple are stepping back from the form over function precipice and are being more pragmatic, to the benefit of customers.

Exactly. It seems that while Jobs was able to balance/direct Ive in a constructive way, Cook was not. So at least from the outside Ive started to have an outsized impact on the final product, to the detriment of the product’s final quality. It took Ive’s departure for things for things to go back to normal.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#475

Post by skynet-9000 »

powersnail wrote: post #426
oblio wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, I was going to start an auction site with the memorable name "eBay", but then someone beat me to it.

(Counterpoint: it is pretty short and pronounceable..)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#476

Post by gher-shyu3i »

burkaman wrote: post #472
woofie11 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I'm a firm believer in continuing to innovate and improve governance. I don't think it's just an abstract philosophical argument. These things can be modeled with game theory (cite: The Dictator's Handbook). There are opinions and philosophies about evolution, vaccines, and lots of other things, but at the end of the day, those can be reso…

A discussion about vaccines can be resolved through rational discourse only if everyone agrees that diseases are bad for you. If I think disease is good, you can't convince me that vaccines are good for society, even if we agree on their effects. That's a contrived example, but this kind of disagreement is very common in discussions about government and society. If you believe that individual choice is important and…

The solution is to look at systems that have been proven to work. I brought up the Islamic Golden Age in this thread. It doesn't have the nonsense of putting a hard cap on anyone's wealth. It actually encourages people to work and gather wealth morally, and spend it correctly. The best of both worlds so to speak.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#477

Post by jasoncrawford »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #356
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…

> His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra" True. I've heard (employee #20k-something, joined in early 2008) that the issue with Cadabra was its resemblance to the sound of the word "cadaver".

I heard the same story (I joined in 2004). The version I heard was that Jeff was driving cross-country NY -> Seattle and was on the phone with his lawyer about incorporation papers, and the lawyer misheard “Cadabra” as “Cadaver”. That's when Jeff knew he needed a better name.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#478

Post by SahAssar »

colonwqbang wrote: post #402
godelski wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my country it is illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel. Just curious: 1) What country 2) Do you have to pay?

1) I'd rather not say, although you can probably figure out from my post history if you really want to know 2) Yes

Actually, (if I guessed your country right) since 2019 it is replaced by a "general public service fee", which is a tax that is earmarked for public service uses.

You might not like where your taxes go, but at least you can vote for that to change. In a company you have no such freedom unless you have the financial ability to buy stock.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#479

Post by jdmichal »

ciupicri wrote: post #263
techlatest_net wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here is the video from 1999 [1] showing his obsession with customer which is why customer support is in the DNA of Amazon 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o

Amazon's customer support is mediocre at best. I tried to buy something from them and the card transaction failed because I had some protections in place. Instead of them trying again, they asked for all kinds of documents to prove the ownership. I sent them a receipt from a local store, but it wasn't good enough for them. I guess they don't want my money :-)

I would never take a receipt as proof of card ownership. If I were to find a wallet, what's the chance that there's a random receipt stuffed in there along with the card?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#480

Post by mssundaram »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #98
mssundaram wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Bill Gates truly has developed compassion for the less fortunate, however moving his money into the foundation is a very convenient tax strategy, and I suspect he enjoys the challenges and influence he has, and less so the warm fuzzies from helping people. (I anticipate this comment will not go over well, as it seems I must just not see the truth that Bill Gates is a perfectly benevolent being who has ascende…

I anticipate this comment will not go over well, as it seems I must just not see the truth that Bill Gates is a perfectly benevolent being who has ascended from human qualities He’s not benevolent or lead a perfectly good life. But he decided to spend his billions on trying to improve the world and you all are still hung up on the anti trust things he did at Microsoft. Or think he’s doing it to “gain power and influe…

stop coming up with weird conspiracy theories about why he’s spending his money

Well firstly, no I don't have to do any of that. And secondly, it's not a theory about a conspiracy. It's more of a speculation. Finally, I highly doubt his benevolence, that's my whole point as I said in my original post - he probably enjoys the influence a lot more than he enjoys helping people.

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