Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone. When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders c…
I'm curious, what was the reason for starting with books?
It’s quite simple: generally standardized product sizes and media mail. Don’t think it’s farfetched to say Amazon benefited greatly from USPS in its early days.
Because money is power, corporations are not democratic, and putting so much power in the hands of one person or a handful of people is dangerous to society. I would also refer you to the entire history of US antitrust law, which will be hard for anyone to summarize in a comment. The whole field of competition law is a question of how to balance the rights of those running a business with the rights of those affected…
I think the problem is that it's not obvious why getting super big is bad. Anti-trust is a law around abuse of customers by cornering a market. But what if they haven't abused customers? What if they treat customers really well and otherwise provide a lot of value? Why stop them from becoming that big? (It is a big company, but I also appreciate being able to order on-demand compute, or getting like a hundred million…
Imagine a $2T company. One day CEO decides that his company should stand for only Republican values, donate them handsomely, buy newspapers for them, start TV channels for them, only offer employment to republican leaning persons, introduce new laws through lobby... All of these is in fact legal. When a company becomes too big, a single person can control its resources towards hurting political system, general public good, tilt opinions and so on. You are then relying on this one person to knowingly or unknowingly not make a bad move. Most often, they will.
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…
How about "underpay relative to the value they produce"?
They produce the same value as a Sears warehouse worker, or a Circuit City warehouse worker.
The reason that Amazon is successful, but Sears and Circuit City aren’t isn’t because of the warehouse workers.
Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone. When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders c…
I was there as a developer and a consumer. I don’t remember anyone laughing at him for selling books. It was an obvious play to most of us.
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 f…
Hmmm... That is not how I remember it. I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's. I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers. Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available. Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exi…
I find it funny that you mention half a dozen ways to search the web and everyone seems to be focusing on just gopher because that is the only thing they can explain away. Google must have dug up Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
This is the “new amazon.” Old Amazon was really customer focused. Back when prime was a good value ($80/year for 2 shipping) everything just worked. You could find products easily, order, automate reorders. In the past five years, every visit to Amazon involved wading through ads for bad products (eg, search for Iphone7, see sponsored ads for Samsung phones). There are more sponsored line items than actual results. P…
My experience with Walmart is poorly packed boxes handled roughly by FedEx leading to a bunch of damaged orders. At this point Amazon's delivery service itself is a differentiator for me, and I don't love the company or paying for prime.
That was mine with Walmart for a long time. In 2020, I tried using them and find that they seemed to have improved. Normally packed boxes, speedily shipped. For me, I usually get UPS.
But I think the biggest thing for Walmart is the site as shopping for hard drives shows you hard drives instead of whatever people pay for ads. I was able to find the product I wanted more easily.
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 f…
I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot. Google did nothing particularly inno…
Exactly, the single feature that made me use google over yahoo/altavista was the clean interface, I was using dial up back then and it loaded very quickly the others were covered in ads.
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 f…
The early internet, for me, was a 1-800 number BBS called Starfire. It had a splash page to the “internet” section that I’d assume was curated by the operator. This was probably 94 and 95.
It's too bad that as soon as AT&T gets to commercialize the lab it ran it to the ground. Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful. That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit b…
The profit motive spurs innovation.
That might be one of many things they spurs innovation, but the neoliberal idea that greed is the only human impulse that matters is false, primitive, and very sad.
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 :-)
I remember being on Tymnet and just trying addresses via a program to see if I found anything. Most interesting thing I found was a Fed Reserve address once (did not do anything with that).