This is such an important point in Tim Carmody’s (highly recommended) Amazon newsletter. Not only is Amazon enormously popular but critics of the firm fail to understand the basis of this popularity, as opposed to the insight they have into the popularity of a firm like Apple: One study last year showed that Amazon was the second […]
Tag: amazon
There’s an interesting passage in Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, in which he discusses the contrasting experience of Amazon Mechanical Turk by users and workers. From loc 719: While AMT is profiting robustly, 11 it has –following the observations of several workers –not made significant updates to its user interfaces since its inception, and […]
From Misbehaving, by Richard Thaler, pg 134. Social norms hindered it in this instance. Why could the same not true be true of online retail? The CEO of Coca-Cola also discovered the hard way that violating the norms of fairness can backfire. Douglas Ivester, aged fifty-two, appeared to be on his way to the job of […]
From Humans Need Not Apply, by Jerry Kaplan, pg 101-102: there’s another reason the financial markets value the company at more than six hundred times earnings (2013), when the average is around twenty times earnings: they look forward to the inevitable time when the company extracts monopoly prices after locking in its customers and scorching […]
Ironically, I had to wait to take a picture of this after initially seeing it, as it was on a billboard that rotates every 10 seconds:
From The Everything Story by Brad Stone: “I don’t know if you guys don’t have high standards or if you just don’t know what you’re doing” “If that’s our plan, I don’t like our plan” “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “Does it surprise you that you don’t know the answer to that question?” “Why are you […]
From page 75 of Brad Stone’s excellent book The Everything Store: In early 1998, Bezos was closely involved with a department called Personalization and Community, which was geared toward helping customers discover books, music, and movies they might find interesting. That May, he surveyed what was then Amazon’s Hot 100 bestseller list and had an […]
