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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#61

Post by dingaling »

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…

> We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release.

To me, who served 15 years of corporate coding dronery for a Fortune 100 company, that sounds totally awesome.

In all that time I served on three teams.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#62

Post by B-Con »

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…

You make it sound like every non-existent product was a failure, at that many were press-release driven. But companies do try weird things just to see what sticks sometimes.

> (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won't admit it)

This is an example. Glass was clearly an experimental product to gather information. It was advertised, priced, and distributed like one. If you think it was a failure or is dead, you paid little to no attention to the life cycle.

Throw something at the wall, see what happens, refine, try again. Refining the experiment or using the information to go pursue something else isn't failure. I would assume that Amazon has a similar philosophy, at least to some extent.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#63

Post by nknighthb »

michaelt wrote: post #55
nknighthb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) You mean the drone delivery they're actively testing in the UK? The drone delivery they're fighting with the FAA about? The drone delivery they just testified before Congress about? They're spending an awful lot of time, money, and political capital on something that makes no sense, will neve…

When I hear "drone delivery" I hear some PR guys spending $500 on a hobby drone, carrying a trivial weight a short distance within line-of-sight of a manual operator, then we don't hear any more about it. Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.c…

Last week, Amazon's VP of global public policy testified before the Senate Commerce Committee[0] about the FAA's delays in approving testing in the US that they've already begun in other countries. An FAA administrator testified in the same hearing. This comes more than a year after Amazon's initial announcement on December 1, 2013.[1]

This is the same VP, by the way, that testified before the same committee in January on net neutrality.[2]

Are you suggesting he's lying to Congress?

Last year, Amazon hired for their Prime Air team, among other high-profile individuals, a former NASA astronaut, a Keyhole co-founder, and a mess of aerospace vets and MIT grads.[3]

Argue all you want about its viability, but this is not "a press release" or "april fool's joke".

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/24/amazon-con...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-d...

[2] http://recode.net/2015/01/21/congress-still-bickering-over-n...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/20/despite-faa-setbacks-amazon...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#64

Post by ProblemFactory »

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…

I'm very doubtful of drone delivery until battery tech advances at least 10x.

In dense, built-up areas there is no space to land. You can't fly between buildings and land on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and where would you leave the package there?

In rural and suburban areas, where houses have backyards, the flight range starts to be a problem. Amazon isn't going to build a full warehouse every 5-10km, even "drone depots" seem doubtful with that density. With "drone depots" instead of proper warehouses, the packages would still have to be trucked in, so 1-2 day delivery instead of 1-2 hour delivery, and the only motivation would be cost saving over traditional mail carriers.

Perhaps if batteries become a lot more capable, then having drone depots every 20-50km in suburbia might end up profitable over paying for mail.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#65

Post by icebraining »

moe wrote: post #41
stingraycharles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?) In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general. Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.

I don't think brand identity is about getting people to care; it's about creating an association in their mind, so that when they need X, they'll think of Y, instead of conscientiously having to think about where to get it.

Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#67

Post by bederoso »

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…

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 determine how much I get paid or what I work on, they are there to support the business and are accountants, financial managers, etc.

> It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers.

Who isn't? Most companies are short on talented engineers.

> Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business.

Shows how little you know about the company. Instant Video is huge, Website is huge, other/restricted projects are huge, and there are a lot of engineers on all those teams. Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.

> If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types.

As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.

> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back

The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).

The other points you make are either subjective or anecdotes, but overall I think you just hate the company for some reason and are spilling every negative interaction you ever had.

I truly hope talented people don't buy on your negativity. Amazon is definitely not a terrible place to work at, even though it does have some problems (what company doesn't?).

Re: Amazon Home Services

#68

Post by vidarh »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #64
flyinglizard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm very doubtful of drone delivery until battery tech advances at least 10x. In dense, built-up areas there is no space to land. You can't fly between buildings and land on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and where would you leave the package there? In rural and suburban areas, where houses have backyards, the flight range starts to be a problem. Amazon isn't going to build a full warehouse every 5-10km, even "drone depots…

While I agree with you that space to land is an issue, in terms of trucking in packages to smaller depots, Amazon already does this in some markets like the UK, where it is investing heavily in regional depots and doing "first level" delivery from their large warehouses to the smaller depots themselves.

Here it depends on quite high population density in the regions they are putting depots, which still has the landing space issue, but e.g. their two London depots puts them within possible delivery distance of several million people with front or back gardens. A large proportion of the ones who don't have private gardens have communal spaces.

The bigger problem than where to land for me would be how to handle "handover" to their customer without ending up leaving packages in plain sight in areas where it's easy for someone to snatch it.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#69

Post by golergka »

pgcosta wrote: post #26
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #3

Amazon can now let me hire a goat herder[0] to get my lawn eaten down. Is there anything they can't sell? [0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UBYDXXQ/ref=vas_sf_GoatGrazing

We wanted flying cars, instead we got goat rentals. :D

And Goat Simulators.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#70

Post by ChristianGeek »

dagw wrote: post #31
techsupporter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And don't assume Zip codes have 5-digits only Aren't ZIP (it's an initialism, Zone Improvement Plan) codes by definition a US-only thing? Even in countries that don't call them post/postal codes, they're not known as ZIP codes.

Pedantically, yes. Practically, no. Basically everybody in the US uses the phrase "zip-code" informally to mean postal code even when talking about international addresses.

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