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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#931

Post by 93po »

vishnugupta wrote: post #742
93po wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.

Amazon has had (and continues to have) its share of failed products, a very lot of them in fact. But then that's just how they operate[1]. Given their DNA they wouldn't have been where they are without those failed experiments. One could argue it's just one of those PR angles. But it's not. My last stint at Amazon was in Kindle tablet team. And boy did they experiment with hardware! ~2012 was the year when Amazon mad…

Echo came years after Google Now and Siri and Cortana. Taking years old concepts and putting them into a speaker isn't really that inventive. No one is getting a Nobel prize for the Echo.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#932

Post by ianai »

telltruth wrote: post #851
hbosch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Microsoft are arguably much better off today with their new leaders than they might've been. I don't see your point? I think Facebook, too, could use a new face at the top as a matter of fact.

They are not. On the surface revenues keeps growing, profits are enormous but underneath there are virtually no new product lines. If you look at Microsoft of 1990s, there were new $1B business each year - MSSQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics etc etc. For Apple, Jobs made it a point for one new product line every 2-3 years. For Google, you had new stuff like Gmail, Maps keep coming. Now its mostly barren land. Amazon had a lo…

Exactly. Expect Prime membership to cost more and deliver less. New suits aren’t going to be beholden to Jeff’s mode of thinking and this historical precedent. We may well see Video culled outright or spun off into another media subscription, etc.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#933

Post by realolokunmama »

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#934

Post by 93po »

hodgesrm wrote: post #729
93po wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.

Plus... * public cloud computing -- Amazon got it to work in a scalable and secure way. * S3 object storage * Dynamo -- A distributed, key-value store that ended up in products from S3 to Cassandra * Redshift -- First cloud SQL data warehouse with ground-breaking ease of use * RDS -- Cloud relational databases * Amazon Aurora -- Relational DBMS that pushes the log and store into a virtualized, replicated storage laye…

Crediting amazon for "public cloud computing" is pretty ridiculous. Managed VPS services were a thing when Amazon was still a book store.

Yes, Amazon's services make things easier and in some instances cheaper. None of it was really inventive, though, and definitely not comparable to the list of Bell inventions.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#935

Post by ianai »

telltruth wrote: post #847
ianai wrote: post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

Please also include Google in your list.

That’s actually a really good example too. The fact I didn’t shows how far they’ve slipped of late.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#936

Post by richardknop »

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

Oh wow that's nice. Yeah, Amazon was definitely a better name choice.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#937

Post by radu_floricica »

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…

That's a _very_ fair practice to attack, although to be honest once the rules have been written it would be kinda stupid not to play the game this way. But allowing cities to offer huge allowances and tax breaks is hugely unequal to other businesses in that area, and creates perverse incentives where the auction ends up with a likely negative value, just so some politician can brag that he brought X or Y or Z in his city.

To note that this is the opposite of free market: the crux of the problem is allowing politicians to write checks/tax deductions to businesses for purely political purposes.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#938

Post by blueside »

blihp wrote: post #924
piva00 wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 onlin…

And it's been September ever since

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#939

Post by morelisp »

catacombs wrote: post #919
morelisp wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questions shouldn't focus on what he lets get printed - we still live in an age where journalism seems to have minimal consequences no matter the quality - but what happens if e.g. the WaPo Guild takes action in solidarity with an Amazon union.

> The questions shouldn't focus on what he lets get printed Bezos has no say in what can and can't be published.

There is a difference between "does not have editorial oversight" - which I believe - and "has no say in what can be published" - which is trivially false since as owner he could do anything from hire only sports reporters to shut the whole thing down if he wanted.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#940

Post by slowmovintarget »

goto11 wrote: post #798
ourcat wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" at the time became so popular due to the word 'Internet' compared to a 'Netscape'. So many non-technical people just thought that was the 'way in' when they bought their first PC.

Internet Explorer became popular because it was bundled with Windows.

At the time, IE was also dramatically faster than Netscape Navigator, because it wasn't just bundled, it was built in.
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