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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

There 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.

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They did NOT pioneer personalized recommendations. Believe me, I know, because out-of-the-blue I got a phone call from Jeff Bezos back in the day, who was interested in my pre-existing recommendation technology. They didn't have any. In the end they got it from a company called Net Perceptions. Eventually they built their own, but the technology was firmly established all over the place by then.

Indeed, 1-click remains the most egregious land grab of the web yet.

"I'm going to patent shopping".

I think we should not discount "Prime's insanely fast shipping". That is an amalgamation of several innovations and has truly changed the world.

Of course, all this if Amazon has actually invented that and I am not just misinformed.

> truly changed the world.

Some parts of the continental United States, mostly in large coastal cities.

Amazon’s secret sauce is in their operational efficiencies and logistics. AWS is great but utility computing conceptually it’s a mainframe bureau from the 1970s.

> 1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO

Well, it is according to the US Patent Office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent), and unfortunately that's the only opinion that counts in this case (at least as far as the US is concerned)

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