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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#821

Post by carmen_sandiego »

noncoml wrote: post #707
paxys wrote: post #52

It was public knowledge that Bezos stopped running Amazon day-to-day a while ago. It was headed by the two execs under him (Andy Jassy for AWS and Jeff Wilke for retail). Jassy even had the CEO (of AWS) title. With Wilke announcing his retirement a few months ago, Jassy was the clear frontrunner to take over from Bezos. In hindsight I guess Wilke retired because Jassy was picked over him. The timing of the announceme…

I just hope Andy Jassy will not bring the AWS customer support to retail, because Amazon is screwed if he does.

AWS support is pretty great in my experience. That’s with a paid plan, but I consider it great even for a paid plan. Typically instant chat with someone who can usually fix it is a game changer.

I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect free support for such a technical product to be as good as that for the retail site.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#822

Post by me_me_me »

radu_floricica wrote: post #812
giomasce wrote: post #794

"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.

I have some karma to burn, so let's do this again. Underpay compared to what? There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that. You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative. A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go…

> Amazon is a cheap target for young idealists

Maybe its a target because is a behemoth of a target.

Amazon is so big US states were competing in a bezos d*k sucking competition to have their hq built in their state.

A company famous for paying zero taxes and its biggest slice of workforce are being optimised like a computer program to squeeze every last $ they can produce at the expense of the workforce.

So if amazon is a bad target what else should be then? Or maybe everything is fine and the invisible hand is going to fix all of the problems?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#823

Post by Mauricebranagh »

TMWNN wrote: post #522
oarsinsync wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.

I wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.

Back in the early days 94/95 people quite often used to type single word domains just to see what was out there.

This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#824

Post by geogra4 »

deaddodo wrote: post #652
wyclif wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are firing on all cylinders And yet, reviews are still horribly broken and have been for years. Also counterfeit products and books are everywhere on the site. Amazon is going to have to fix those hugely important things before I'll buy the Kool-Aid that they're "firing on all cylinders", which is just CEO pep talk.

The marketplace makes me use Amazon less now. I don't care if there are 40 5v-DC power bricks and 10 of them are 10% cheaper. I care about vetted products and the confidence I'm buying the product I'm looking for.

Honestly for little stuff like that I'd rather go straight to the source from aliexpress than bother with Amazon as the middleman

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#825

Post by Mauricebranagh »

oconnor663 wrote: post #412
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.

Fwiw, a "face book" is a thing you would get at Harvard (and Yale and presumably lots of other schools too but I'm not sure), kind of like a yearbook but at the start of freshman year instead of the end. So for the earliest thefacebook.com users, the name was actually familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

Its a thing in all US high schools - so for US searchers it would be very obvious

Back in the 70's in the UK one of our American teachers mentioned then in our general studies class when we where doing America one term - she refused to show us her entry :-)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#826

Post by giomasce »

radu_floricica wrote: post #812
giomasce wrote: post #794

"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.

I have some karma to burn, so let's do this again. Underpay compared to what? There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that. You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative. A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go…

Quite agree that Amazon is a cheap target: they do very bad things and they are able to do them at scale; one might argue even in a monopoly situation. Doesn't make stuff fairer. Rest assured it's not my only target, if that's what troubles you.

Amazon's choice to exploit workers might very well be an industry standard, but this doesn't make it a choice any less: Amazon boasts about leading on important social issues, but that's the real bullshit. They just do as the others, no virtue at all. Being in the strong position, they might have the opportunity to make the industry fairer, but they willingly decided not even to try.

I like how in your world megacorp automatically get the benefit of doubt, while people pissing in their pants because they cannot go to the bathroom are "relatively" fine.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#827

Post by rightbyte »

radu_floricica wrote: post #812
giomasce wrote: post #794

"As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues". A bold claim for a company widely known to exploit and underpay workers in distribution warehouses.

I have some karma to burn, so let's do this again. Underpay compared to what? There has to be some comparison here. You can't say "underpay" and leave it at that. You might try and weasel and say "underpay compared to a decent living wage". Well, I have news for you - even that's relative. A fair comparison would be "underpay compared to the rest of the warehouse industry". Which begs the question - why do people go…

> Amazon is a cheap target for young idealists simply because it's visible

Easy targets are the best targers.

Amazon is the raise of centralized retail and computing.

Furthermore replacing store workers with fully appized gig delivery drivers is probably no net gain for small towns.

You don't have to be a "young idealist" to be worried about Amazon eating everyones lunch.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#828

Post by sobani »

baskire wrote: post #635
paxys wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust aside, has there ever been a business reason to split up Amazon? I doubt anyone inside the company ever took that talk seriously.

the market caps of each department spun out is likely greater than the current market cap of Amazon today. That is assuming the companies would all be as successful being spun out.

In a way that's the case with every company. Each part is more valuable on it's own, unless it's more valuable together with another part. :P

btw, it looks like you have some sort of shadowban. I don't see any terrible comments among your last 20 or so, so you might want to ask @dang if he can look into your case.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#829

Post by robertlagrant »

gnicholas wrote: post #410

> As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues. Two high-impact examples: our $15 minimum wage and the Climate Pledge. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think they made these moves because of altruism. They do pay their warehouse employees more than some warehouses, and people talk about changing jobs to work at Amazon because the pay is better. But they also…

Everything they do in service of that to some extent, or they'd not be able to function. That balancing act is hard to get right.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#830

Post by einpoklum »

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 don't know about you, but I would go by books at books.com - or rather, I would if I were in the US.

By the way, books.com redirects to barnesandnoble.com

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