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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#921

Post by davidrupp »

obenn wrote: post #302
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…

Was it ever named “relentless” at some point? I’ve heard that was the original name, relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com.

"Bezos and his wife grew fond of another possibility: Relentless.com. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon." -- Stone, Brad. The Everything Store (p. 31). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

N.B.: "Today", in the context of that quote, is ca. 2013, when the book was published. relentless.com redirected to amazon.com for me this morning (2021-02-03).

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#923

Post by grogenaut »

efwfwef wrote: post #457
ignoramous wrote: post #70

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. Jeff's pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM > The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while. Here's Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUy…

"this is day 1". I'm wondering for what else it is day 1, right now. I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it's not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up. What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?

Quibble: to me "This is day one" is less about "what market can we get in on the ground floor of and ride a wave". It is more to underscore we are driving the innovation or market and that we are always starting from zero, never too late to change / pivot and we're still aggressively growing everything, or that is the goalline.

That isn't meant to take away from your question. As a developer I'm often focused on leaf concerns. Your question is more about broad strokes and I have to remind myself to think about fundamental changes.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#924

Post by blihp »

piva00 wrote: post #790
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could gopher topics by early 90's So you weren't a normal, mainstream, new user to the internet. You knew how to use it, you knew where to go to search. I was the same in the 90s (minus Gopher skills), I learned about Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. and became a wizard to my friends and some relatives because I could find things on the internet, didn't need to know the website address beforehand or click somewhe…

Actually that was very normal for a new Internet user of the time. In the early 90's there was no web as far as the public was concerned so Yahoo (1994)/Altavista (1995)/Infoseek (1994) did not exist yet. For users of the pre-1993/1994 Internet, to use it you had to learn a hodge-podge of protocols and software including UUCP, gopher, FTP, telnet, NNTP etc. since that was the Internet back then. It wasn't until online services like AOL started providing web gateways (1995/6?) when 'normal' people really started flooding onto the 'net and it took a few years longer before there were useful web frontends for the majority of services.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#925

Post by neolefty »

ElectricMind wrote: post #796

I wanted to work for Amazon then I read "The Everything Store..." and how brutal this guy is even to his loyal people. How he treated initial people who supported him. Amazon is part of the club- I don't want to work companies. Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX and adding more

Are there large companies that you would like to work for?

Keeping a healthy culture in a small company seems feasible. Not sure about large companies?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#926

Post by notSupplied »

me_me_me wrote: post #822
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…

> 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 amazo…

States and cities competing to undercut each other in offering sweet deals for Amazon HQs and sports team stadiums had always felt extremely wrong to me. If anything has a natural right to behave like a cartel when negotiating against businesses, it is municipal and state governments.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#927

Post by autokad »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #655
kevstev wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

another issue I don't see talked about much in these comments is trust. Amazon had to develop a name that people could trust. I remember when people would agonize on whether to make a purchase because they were afraid they would be scammed.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#928

Post by notSupplied »

DickingAround wrote: post #627
burkaman wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EU anti-trust takes harm to competing business into account, but American anti-trust is totally focused on consumer harm, and specifically harm from higher prices.

So unsurprisingly, American tech monopolies are usually middleman-monopolies that offer low (often free) prices while squeezing businesses on the other side. Facebook/Google sells the user as the product, while Amazon is GREAT for low prices, but not so great, and sometimes ruinous for the sellers.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#929

Post by autokad »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #837
kevstev wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a 3 year span or so where people just attributed google's success to minimalism. in terms of minimalism, hotbot was a disaster, but it was the algorithm that truly set google apart.

minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#930

Post by TheTrotters »

newswasboring wrote: post #793
pjmorris wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And IBM invented the hard drive, (arguably) computer product lines, the relational database, and standardized the 8-bit byte. Pretty sure I'm leaving stuff out. They're not quite Bell Labs, but they're incredibly influential.

I always find it surprising that things we take for granted today needed to be standardized. Like I can't even imagine computers not using a 8 bit byte.

Some mentioned to me recently that most teenagers may have never used a non-touch phone. It's obvious to them that iPhones and iPads are around and work the way they do.

But I still remember first using the iPhone 3G in 2008 and how it felt like magic to control a device with my fingers, to zoom into a photo with a simple gesture.

I wonder what technology will make them (and me too!) feel like this. Perhaps an electric car? I've never driven (or even been in one) but from what I hear they're much quieter. Maybe it'll feel like magic if I ever get one.

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