WSJ Excerpts Upcoming Bezos Bio

online.wsj.com

39 points·taylorbuley··8 comments

Recommended side reading for the excerpt/bio are some of the comments by ex-Amazon employee nirvana a few days' ago on the "Steve's Platform Rant" thread. Here's the lead comment by nirvana:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102129

After reading that, I'm definitely going to make an effort to give Amazon less money.

As long as this topic has been brought up, what do people think of NewEgg, these days? I've supported them for the useful comments on their site.

They used to have a good "buzz" about them, including how they treated both customers and employees, but I've been seeing more negative comments about them in the last couple of years.

I like how they conveniently left out the fact that Amazon lost money hand over fist for years before finally becoming profitable.

That is an 'excerpt'.

So like most big successes, I see the Amazon story is basically a combo of huge luck (the yahoo promo) and the ignorance to run with it.

Funny how we'll never know the names of the coders that made it all happen, only the guy steering the ship everyone else empowers gets the credit.

"When Amazon got its start, we had brilliant engineers. I didn't know all of them, but I knew some of them. Examples? Shel Kaphan. Brilliant. Greg Linden. Brilliant." - Steve Yegge

Shel Kaphan:

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

Greg Linden:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/

Lots of sloppy inaccuracies in the story. My favorite: "The best of them [customer service reps] could answer a dozen emails a minute". Ummm...that should be "hour".

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