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> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia: > Researchers working at Bel
by wheybags 6y ago
> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s
Come on man, that's just bs.
From wikipedia:
> Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoUpvoted; and thanks for sharing these details. They might be obvious for you, but I had only a limited knowledge of all that innovation happening at Bell Labs.
- wheybags 6y agoYou're in today's lucky 10,000 (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/) :)
- orthecreedence 6y agoOtherwise known as a blind spot: https://memestatic1.fjcdn.com/comments/Heckifiknowcomicscompost148997849519+_7ea3ce24c7b26efd546a20caf03c5e72.jpg https://memestatic1.fjcdn.com/comments/Heckifiknowcomicscomp...
- nomercy400 6y agoLucent Technologies once made a video, with many of Bell Labs' inventions, captured in a song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU
- rajansaini 6y agoDidn't Yann LeCun do important work on CNNs there as well?
- lr1970 6y agoYes, this was after ma Bell was broken up and Yann ended up in the AT&T Research. And then AT&T management closed the whole project. Glory days of Bell Labs are all in the distant past, unfortunately.
- sib 6y agoNot to be difficult, but how many of those were invented in the past 27 years? Bell Labs is (barely even) a shadow of its former self. If you want to read a great book about when Bell Labs was really Bell Labs: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSZIWG/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSZIWG/
- vvanpo 6y agoJeff said > I don’t know of another company He didn't say contemporary company.
- denysvitali 6y agoWell, maybe he is right, he might not be aware of Bell Labs or he might have forgot about it before typing that email
- pwinnski 6y agoOr, and hear me out here, he might have lied. It's funny how many people on this page are having trouble acknowledging that this is a prevaricating puff piece. He wants to tell a story of his success, and leave in a way that doesn't tank the stock. So he lies a bit about the origin of the company, lies a bit more about their accomplishments, and so on.
- denysvitali 6y agoI should have added a /s I'm not protecting him, this is more like a PR stunt rather than a letter to his employees. Given the history, I can safely say that he might not care _that much_ as shown in this open letter
- arp242 6y agoThere are quite a few caveats with all of the items he lists: > We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. 1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not "invent" the concept), Alexa is a Siri clone, and so forth. Only "infrastructure cloud computing" is something there Amazon really took the lead and invented stuff. Not a small thing, but also hardly worthy of the bold claim in the article. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and many other companies seem to have done more invention than Amazon.
- Aperocky 6y agoIt'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 baby bells had no incentive to keep the lab and they proceeded to ruin it.
- pasquinelli 6y agoThe profit motive spurs innovation.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoThis assumes peopleare only motivated by greed. That's wrong. In the current class climate it would be fair to say that desperation is feeding innovation. Whether peoplecan be a more innovative when they're not desperate, stressed out, overworked, and surrounded by people worse off than them is a fair question but I suspect that's not where you were going. Anecdotally, I'm not a fraction creative or innovative when I'm desperate. My risk tolerance increases but that's a disingenuous measure of innovation.
- woobilicious 6y agoThe conflation of greed and profit is disingenuous. profit, or economic surplus is a requirement for innovation, doesn't matter if it's private, or public spending, what matters is that day to day costs to operate a business or society at large are met before money is spent on risky R&D. Every rational entity does this, you take your revenue, and spend it on necessities to sustain yourself (like food and shelter), sustain your income (transport etc), and then only spend the surplus on higher risk items (stocks, vacation, luxury foods etc). If you were on an island, and grew your own food, I assume you would also follow the profit motive, keeping a healthy excess in production for a drought or taking Sunday off to relax, or fixing your dwelling. We can have a rational discussion about how a company and society at large distributes it's profits, whether it's internally back to employees, R&D or explicit focusing on shareholder value, or using taxes to fund R&D. But what I assume most people have a problem with is not economic profit, but prioritizing excessive shareholder profit, over everything else. Using shareholder value as an excuse to ignore the real needs of your employees or customers, or even the long term sustainability of the company. We also have to remember that value is subjective, and when economists talk about profit, they're talking about something subjective. someone who collects stamps for fun, is profitable if they maintain a surplus of stamps. Just like one might buy GME stock to gain in something like social capital.
- avrionov 6y agoIBM also has 5 Nobel prize winners, but this was different time. I don't think we'll see it again.
- pjmorris 6y agoAnd 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.
- newswasboring 6y agoI 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.
- tim333 6y agoFirst computer I used had 36 bit bytes (PDP-10)
- tgv 6y agoNitpick: they were called words.
- TheTrotters 6y agoSome 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.
- 6y ago
- runarberg 6y agoWorth noting also is the company qualifier. To exclude universities from innovations seems arbitrary. Another line of attack is asking how much profit Amazon got from these innovation vs. how much they paid back to the various education systems that produced the skilled labor required. Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.
- Green_man 6y agoOr maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.
- runarberg 6y agoI mean, you can say you have the fastest Fiat, no doubt someone will point out that Fiats on average are all slow next to a Ferrari. The you can just point out that we are just talking about Fiats, not Ferraries. But that doesn’t change the fact that the having the fastest Fiat is not that impressive given that Ferraries are an order of magnitude faster then Fiats.
- Green_man 6y agoThat's fair, my argument is less that reframing the context is always bad, and more that the original context of [Amazon] in [Companies] makes a lot of sense. I also think that the presented Fiat vs Ferrari is a poor analogy. Why, in your view, are universities so much better than Amazon and other top tech companies? In my view, they're often doing far more than universities on the cutting edge of research. While there are certainly some tradeoffs in a corporate model, I think that universities and tech companies are both effective research organizations, but have different focuses. To use the cars metaphor, it's like some discussion about Ferrari vs Bugatti vs Koenigsegg vs etc. and then someone starts talking about superbikes. Amazon may compete with universities for employees, but they don't directly compete with universities in market share, products, or services.
- 93po 6y agoAnd Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.
- whalesalad 6y agoDon’t forget the dash button to replenish charmin ultra at the snap of a finger.
- hashkb 6y agoBut not fast enough for emergencies.
- hodgesrm 6y agoPlus... * 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 layer They've been particularly innovative in applications related to data.
- 93po 6y agoCrediting 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.
- hodgesrm 6y agoThis can't be a serious argument. Even today there's no cloud provider with the breadth of services that Amazon offers. Amazon didn't just implement cloud technologies like block storage, networking models, and off-board hardware support for virtualization; they created an entirely new programming model on those services. I've heard the "it's not inventive" arguments like this from companies that tried to compete with Amazon. The one where I worked got creamed.
- dgs_sgd 6y agoI can't be the only one who read "Come on man" in Joe Biden's voice.
- rob74 6y agoYeah, that quote is management hyperbole at its best. I wouldn't even call what Amazon does "invention", maybe "innovation" - but Ok, you have to call it "invention" if you want to patent it, like the (in)famous "one-click patent".
- getlawgdon 6y agoInvention is the lower rung. ATT is the much more inventive + innovative company. Innovation disrupts/transforms. Invention sparks anew. In fact, what makes Amazon so wildly successful is not even particularly inventive but optimization driven.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAlso, XEROX. Invented the laser printer, the mouse, and the GUI. Those are a bit more significant than one-click checkout...