Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I flew up in First Class on Virgin to Seattle next to a key lead on the fire phone. We had a nice long talk about the project and what happened. He vehemently defended the Fire Phone and touted its great and unique aspects while I examined it and admired the hard work he put in. 3D modeling, gyroscopic-driven interactions, an universal activity feed -- some interesting stuff was there...

But there were some serious problems with it like forced promotions where users would would prefer instead functionality, useless gimmicks, and other silliness. Without fail everytime I pointed one out, the Lead looked down a bit bashfully and admitted Bezos had insisted on this nonsense.

Bezos is an blind, egotistical CEO, forcing hardworking engineers to take the fall for his naive and frankly stupid decisions. His instincts in hardware and product without fail have been downright pathetic -- and now he will to blame those who work tirelessly under him for his own failure.

Go read the book "Everything store" and come back. You're not the first one who's been saying stuff like this about him. While reading the book I was amazed how the entire history of the company is full of doubters saying he's doing it wrong and the company will fail. Yet time after time the doubters were proved wrong, and after two decades its growth is only accelerating. Sure he's not perfect and how the company treats employees is far from ideal, but he definitely is not a blind pathetic CEO.

You could almost be talking about Steve Jobs there.

It just so happened that Jobs's companies were mostly highly (sometimes obscenely) profitable, while Amazon stays very near profitless for last ~20 years, having to re-invest all its proceedings.

"having to"? Bezos chooses to.

"Profit" is a very vague term in corporate finance. Just because they don't put the cash in the bank doesn't mean they're not a profitable company.

Yeah next went gangbusters

In the end, this comes down to a question of ends justifying the means.

I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that the company has done very well in many ways. So has Apple. We've learned that both Jobs and Bezos weren't/aren't very good people to work for.

Maybe it's naive of me to think this way, but I'd like to think that companies can be wildly successful without being life sucking and horrible in the process.

No first hand experience, but I've heard/read this many times that Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc aren't good people to work for. Are there any bosses of mega corporations that are good to work for?

You don't hear about this crap from higher ups at Google. Same for current Microsoft leadership for that matter.

Page fired all of Google's project managers at one point. There were good reasons he got moved out of the CEO job for a while.

Everyone who works for Larry Page (and Sundar) seems to be very happy still.

What sometimes tends to happen is that people who are extremely skilled in one area can fool themselves into thinking that they are also skilled in some other area. Whether that's actually true or not is kind of random, but frequently enough they're just fooling themselves. It's a kind of inspired overconfidence, and not listening to doubters is a way to achieve that. The actual skills and intuitions they have may simply not have carried over, and it is their fault if they managed to fool themselves like that.

Or maybe Bezos personality is great for running an online retailer and bad for producing consumer devices.

From personal experience The Kindle Fire is a dreadful device.

That's life. Companies make bets, hire people to execute, and when things don't work out, plans change and staffing sometimes need to adjust. No reason to bash Bezos for taking gambles. They certainly didn't risk the company.

The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already?

The same is true for Google. So much lip service about moonshots and long term thinking and the new CFO comes in and talks about cost discipline and potentially capital return. Turns out dual class shares don't make you anymore 'long-term focused' than the next company.

The entire bull case for AMZN is always "Amazon reinvests all their cash flow into the business" and "Bezos is focused on the long term". Why are they calling it quits already?

Because they are investing their cash in the business, not just spending it. Investing means knowing when an investment is doing poorly and not throwing good money after bad.

Are you telling me that Amazon has written off the smartphone business, one of the most quickly adopted pieces of technology since the original PC and which has made Apple one of the most profitable businesses in the world, as an idea not worth pursuing anymore?

That's certainly possible. Is that so hard to believe?

The Kindle worked out, the Fire phone didnt. Maybe its just the phone models since they're still working on other devices. They also just became more valuable than Walmart. It seems like they know what they're doing, including cutting losses.

The Kindle worked out only after iteration. It was the same for Apple with the iPod and iPhone as well. Amazon has quit in the first inning because their phone wasn't an overnight success. If they were truly focused on the long-term they wouldn't be afraid to continue to invest in it.

Kindle worked out right out of the gate. They dramatically underestimated the demand for the first Kindle.

Certainly that first iteration looks like shit compared to modern iterations, but why would you expect otherwise?

Arguably Bezos' unlikely success with Kindle made people give him the benefit of the doubt when they should not have. That was my take away anyway, from when I was working on Fire Phone (I left my team because of that project, and my experiences with it greatly contributed to my decision to leave the company).

Why not? Microsoft is about to.

The game is over. Apple won the money and Android/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi won the market-share.

Thinking back to the dawn of the (post-IBM) PC era, an awful lot of companies went under trying to win a race to the bottom against IBM and Apple.

Companies that refuse to indulge in "me, too" behavior in the smartphone era are probably making the right call.

Perhaps it would be wise to remove his specific job working on the Fire phone? Wouldn't want him to get in trouble at work for comments like that, even if it was ill advised to say them to a stranger on a flight.

He didn't put a specific job. Key lead could be anything in engineering or product management.

Ah, it's since been edited. It was more specific before.

> Wouldn't want him to get in trouble at work for comments like that

In the off chance that he wasn't one of the engineers who took the fall.

Even if everything you say up to the last clause is perfectly true, it doesn't follow that he blames them for the failure. He simply and objectively doesn't need them if the product they were skilled to do is a flop and has no future.

It's an interesting example of how objectification and anthropormorphism can be the inverse of each other.

We treat the business like a human, assuming it 'blames' people. The business treats humans like objects, throwing them in the garbage when they are no longer of use.

The "he" in my text was intended to reference a human, Jeff Bezos, as the parent of my post did.

Laying someone off is not throwing them in the garbage. It's saying, "We don't have work for you here now." It's painful, and it can be damaging to self-esteem, but at worst, it's throwing them in the recycling...

His instincts on the Kindle paid off spectacularly, which is why his instincts on the phone were trusted.

I've heard this from several engineers at amazon, it's one of the reasons I don't bother calling their recruiters back.

I think it really did have some really smart features -- the instant free on-phone tech support is brilliant -- but it was poorly marketed. I think it could have worked if they pitched it to first-time smartphone owners rather than tacking on a bunch of random things to attract the early adopter crowd.

Counterpoint: if you don't fail once in a while, it's probably not because you're awesome and infallible, but because you're not trying to do anything challenging and/or interesting.

That applies to everybody on the totem pole, from interns to CEOs.

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