Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

aboutamazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#901

Post by wuschel »

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…

> ps. amazon employee #2

I hope it worked out for you! Early days employees bear a high risk.

How was Amazon back then when only a handful people ran the show? Any lessons to be learned?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#902

Post by Aperocky »

closeparen wrote: post #736
Aperocky wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bell Labs levels of excellence don't normally show up in projects that are just for compliance or government relations. This can't be the whole story.

Bell Labs are also ran by the scientists themselves, with AT&T largely not caring because it has to spend that money anyways.

You can get a good grip of what's going on in the lab in Brian Kernighan's . It's a good read.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#903

Post by sharkweek »

swiftcoder wrote: post #768
sharkweek wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fun... what are the major “bad” plays they’ve made? The phone is probably the first that comes to mind. That big MMO they tried to release was pretty bad. I’m gonna try and predict the future and suggest their LotR original series will be bad.

Eh? The MMO seems to be doing ok in pre-release. It was the MOBA that bombed hard.

Ah that might be what I was thinking of, haven’t played either.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#904

Post by littlecranky67 »

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…

One often overlooked fact is that fixed-price book policy of a lot of countries (like here in Germany where we have it to this day) helped amazon a lot. Books have a margin of around 30% and - by law - you must sell them at a fixed price which is the same in every bookstore in the country. That allowed Amazon to offer free shipping, as the resulting margin was still high enough.

And since you as a consumer have to pay the same price for a book no matter where you buy it anyways, it became a lot easier to just order a book online instead of driving to a bookstore to collect it (oftentimes the shop had to order them anyways and you had to come back a day later to pick it up). Once Amazon was a serious player in the book business with existing logistics, payment etc. it was an easy move for them to expand to other products.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#906

Post by monadic3 »

hehehaha wrote: post #856
telltruth wrote: post #838

It is utterly surprising that even Bezos couldn't resist choosing a business MBA guy as his successor just like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Bill Gates did! They talked ALL their lives about importance of "product person", innovators, disruptors, technologists and derided "business" CEOs. But when it came down to it, they ALL chose the safest possible suit at their disposal to run their ships. Steady as it goes...

But Jassy is not a typical MBA guy. He trailblazed the entire cloud industry.

....can MBAs not apply existing business patterns to new industries? How low are your expectations for MBAs that this is a surprise? I fully expect most people could do the same in the same position with similar education.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#907

Post by codezero »

ryanlol wrote: post #842
codezero wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but tho…

> and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right This wasn’t a technical requirement though, sex.com would’ve loaded just fine if it had an A record set.

Many sites didn’t do this right even large ones and often browsers if my memory serves right automatically put www and .com on any single word typed by default. That said yes, that should have worked, I just remember it not working enough that it wasn’t a normal or expected UX pattern until Google and maybe even Chrome.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#908

Post by hnlmorg »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #881
hnlmorg wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were commonly using Lycos and Yahoo as search engines by 1997. Sure, some of the more exciting content wasn’t stuff you’d think to search for and thus would often get shared via word of mouth (like the “Bert is evil” site that parodied the Sesame Street character in compromising photos...after all, which sane persons would search “Bert +hitler” ?) I think the limited time many people had on the internet (as yo…

> Yahoo! Would have online games, chat rooms, site recommendations and email all accessible from its landing page and it was a similar story for many of the other search engines as well. They considered themselves the homepage of the internet (and in many ways they were right). Still a winning business model, because this line could easily describe Facebook.

That’s more a symptom of the lifestyle of any popular software project than it is an example of it being a winning business model.

Time and time again you see these big monolithic applications get displaced by newer more focused applications and people love them because these newer applications run faster / is easier to use / etc etc. Then as those applications gain popularity new features need to be built to continue growth. Whether it is through feature requests, to fight off competitors with other features, or just the businesses way of finding new ways to look individuals into a walled garden....soon this focused application becomes yet another behemoth that people start to moan about. Eventually something new, shiny and focused grabs the public’s attention and we flock to that like the fickle herd of pack animals that we are.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#909

Post by TheCoelacanth »

niek_pas wrote: post #814
radu_floricica wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

That's basically what the word "employ" means in a capitalist economy.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#910

Post by pbrb »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #888
Zsolt wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I had the chance to use the internet I typed in "whitehouse", hit enter and whitehouse.com loaded. It turned out to be a porn site, the teacher saw and I got banned from using the internet - in 40 seconds.

In late high school or maybe during college, my wife was going to look for something at Dick's Sporting Goods by navigating to a domain that any ordinary person might expect. The result was not what she expected.

LOL, I used to fuck with people by getting them to type this into the browser. Unfortunately, these days it actually takes you to Dick's Sporting Goods.
Post reply on HN