8 ms·

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it

by dkyc 12y ago

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

serge2k 12y ago
unless you are working on something and they tell you one it's done and you are getting reorged. or you just end up on a product that makes no sense, but gotta do it because someone wants it/promised it.
stingraycharles 12y ago
The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.
- volaski 12y ago
  I don't believe cloud computing had anything to do with "just a bookstore" either and it turned out pretty well for them.
- icebraining 12y ago
  But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?
  - MCRed 12y ago
    Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
    - aphexairlines 12y ago
      In what way do they hate engineers?
      - yelloblac 12y ago
        Also curious about this. What does "at an executive level" mean?
  - MCRed 12y ago
    Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
- nabaraz 12y ago
  But what about companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple etc? They have the same strategy as well. They use their brand to gain that initial traction and test out a new product. And I disagree with you about a discontinued product hurting their brand. No-one remembers Amazon menu, Amazon movie listings, Microsoft Courier, Google Catalogs, Wave, Google labs etc.
- moe 12y ago
  people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general. Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't think brand identity is about getting people to care; it's about creating an association in their mind, so that when they need X, they'll think of Y, instead of conscientiously having to think about where to get it. Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.
  - wehadfun 12y ago
    >Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business. So true.
- mcherm 12y ago
  > people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) I disagree. I think most people know. Amazon was once a bookstore, then it changed; it's now the website where you buy things. If you're in IT it is also the major host for cloud computing. There it is in a sentence (two for IT specialists). Does this leave out major things like video? Sure, but you asked about the brand, and that seems pretty clear: that website where you buy stuff.
- CPLX 12y ago
  > - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) Amazon is an online hypermarket, and I don't think that's even remotely a secret. People understood the company mission of Sears, Roebuck, & Company, a hundred years ago, and they can certainly understand Amazon's today.
MCRed 12y ago
It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook. Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever. I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company. If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either. My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result! Company is pretty much a joke. I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)
- serge2k 12y ago
  > He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MCRed 12y ago
One of the Amazing things about Amazon, compared to, say Microsoft, and which has since become a huge red flag for me is the culture is very cult like. Amazon management is very adept and focosed on blowing smoke up the skirt of employees. "Today is day one!" Even the use of "door desks"-- that cost the company more money than actual desks would-- is done to perpetuate the "we're just a startup, rah rah rah" BS "Culture". Its' gross manipulation but it also results in people who buy into it being REALLY dedicated to their beliefs-- because deep down people want to believe and Amazon gives them that (even though it then turns around and abuses them.) They do this for a reason-- by having these mantras and these beliefs about the company, it makes people not believe the negatives or think the negatives don't represent the whole company.

by dkyc 12y ago

serge2k 12y ago

unless you are working on something and they tell you one it's done and you are getting reorged. or you just end up on a product that makes no sense, but gotta do it because someone wants it/promised it.

stingraycharles 12y ago

The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.

volaski 12y ago
I don't believe cloud computing had anything to do with "just a bookstore" either and it turned out pretty well for them.
icebraining 12y ago
But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?
- MCRed 12y ago
  Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
  - aphexairlines 12y ago
    In what way do they hate engineers?
    - yelloblac 12y ago
      Also curious about this. What does "at an executive level" mean?
- MCRed 12y ago
  Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
nabaraz 12y ago
But what about companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple etc? They have the same strategy as well. They use their brand to gain that initial traction and test out a new product. And I disagree with you about a discontinued product hurting their brand. No-one remembers Amazon menu, Amazon movie listings, Microsoft Courier, Google Catalogs, Wave, Google labs etc.
moe 12y ago
people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general. Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't think brand identity is about getting people to care; it's about creating an association in their mind, so that when they need X, they'll think of Y, instead of conscientiously having to think about where to get it. Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.
- wehadfun 12y ago
  >Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business. So true.
mcherm 12y ago
> people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) I disagree. I think most people know. Amazon was once a bookstore, then it changed; it's now the website where you buy things. If you're in IT it is also the major host for cloud computing. There it is in a sentence (two for IT specialists). Does this leave out major things like video? Sure, but you asked about the brand, and that seems pretty clear: that website where you buy stuff.
CPLX 12y ago
> - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) Amazon is an online hypermarket, and I don't think that's even remotely a secret. People understood the company mission of Sears, Roebuck, & Company, a hundred years ago, and they can certainly understand Amazon's today.

MCRed 12y ago

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook. Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever. I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company. If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either. My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result! Company is pretty much a joke. I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)

serge2k 12y ago
> He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

MCRed 12y ago

One of the Amazing things about Amazon, compared to, say Microsoft, and which has since become a huge red flag for me is the culture is very cult like. Amazon management is very adept and focosed on blowing smoke up the skirt of employees. "Today is day one!" Even the use of "door desks"-- that cost the company more money than actual desks would-- is done to perpetuate the "we're just a startup, rah rah rah" BS "Culture". Its' gross manipulation but it also results in people who buy into it being REALLY dedicated to their beliefs-- because deep down people want to believe and Amazon gives them that (even though it then turns around and abuses them.) They do this for a reason-- by having these mantras and these beliefs about the company, it makes people not believe the negatives or think the negatives don't represent the whole company.