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Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

This could help balance Amazon’s leadership principles.

Yet Jeff Bezos in his podcast appearance yesterday which was a 2h talk said that when data and anecdote disagree to trust the anecdote and gut feeling

It’s easy to focus on philanthropy and feelings after your monolithic megacorp has ground your competition into dust.

Isn’t that a definition of success in our current society ?

As a thought experiment, is there anything Bezos could do or say that wouldn't merit a hostile and snide comment in response? Is he unforgivable?

Him acting altruistically now with his vast resources is the best we can hope for I suppose.

If he actually changed Amazon's behavior so that it wasn't a horrible place to work for? If he donated an actual, significant portion of his wealth that required real sacrifice on his part?

Basically, if he did something that had a positive effect on the world that also had real consequences for him. Something that actually shows he _means_ it, actually _wants_ the world to be better even if it hurts himself.

If Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg or Gates(1) did any of that, I'd be thinking differently.

(1) The Gates foundation has done a LOT. Bill Gates is still worth ~$135,000,000,000. A quick search says ending homelessness in the USA would take less than a quarter of that.

You do realize there's people who want to be homeless?

I don’t know why you got downvoted. “Smoke your rent, live in a tent” is their motto in Portland.

Hi, hello, I work here, google is down the street, as is microsoft. I can assure you they are not dust. All amazon has done is build more data centers, they havent taken some kind of hostile action towards the competition. The money was on the table, those companies didnt want to spend the time or take the risk, so amazon will gladly hoover it up.

Glad you have a job and stable employment! When I think of who Amazon has "ground into dust," it's not Microsoft and Google. It's Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, hundreds of thousands of small independent bookstores, small businesses that once worried about Walmart moving into the neighborhood now contending with the omnipresence of Amazon. Some of them adapt, yes. Some were going to close anyway, of course. But you can't deny that retail looks a lot different now than it did ten years ago, and most of that is because of Amazon.

The nostalgia for Borders, B&N etc. is amusing considering they were blamed for the demise of independent bookstores before Amazon showed up.

Books are an interesting topic. The cost of publishing through amazon is far more accessible for authors, and the cost of the books themselves has decreased. I dont have enough time in my day to keep up with how many credits I receive from my audible subscription. Digital distribution has made both writing and reading more accessible, its the middle man that got cut out. That is in the nature of innovation, it frees the average person up from more menial tasks and allows them to create higher orders of value using a greater bredth of their creative inputs. That process can also be seen in the wide variety of goods offered on the amazon store, many of which are from those small businesses, the creative and productive factors remain without needing to take up physical real estate.

amazon bought book depository, which used to be the only alternative that shipped books to my country at reasonable prices. No more.

There's another value that's lost, more human, of just browsing a charming book store.

Amazon didn't grind anyone into dust. All they did was build a better book store. We ground them into dust by choosing to buy from Amazon.

Amazon !== AWS, I think what's being referred to is smaller retailers, not other FAANGs.

My brother's store is slowly folding, largely due specifically to Amazon selling cheaper than he can purchase wholesale.

Im sorry for your brother, that sucks. Ill grant this, amazon being a large and well connected company allows them to secure exclusive and vast financing that provides their ability to engage in otherwise unprofitable (anticompetitive) strategies that shouldnt otherwise be possible.

Unfortunately that battle is with our banking system, and until its won you will continue to see the proliferation of companies engaging in this behavior. That said, amazon will eventually be the dinosaur that walmart has become, and its very obvious from a ground level prespective that we dont have the right foundation for the infinite scale we seem to desire; too many "leadership principles", too much reworking of company policy, too much switching us from database to database.

So Amazon is a more efficient business model. Why should I drive to your brother's store when I can just order it right to my door on Amazon? They have done nothing wrong here.

I guess, though if "more efficient business model" means giant corporation can buy and sell in such huge quantities that smaller competitors can't even buy products for same, let alone add small margin for rent and employees, that seems unhealthy. There's no efficiencies they can even attempt at that point.

(Let alone the Amazon shoppers who waste their time demoing and trying products in store, then act like they've caught some scammer if it's a few dollars more than online.)

Then why ever gather the data? The truth table of this is:

  data | gut | out 
    0  |  0  |  0
    0  |  1  |  1
    1  |  0  |  0
    1  |  1  |  1

The data variable is irrelevant here, so you might as well not waste all the resources it takes to collect and analyze it, right?

Gathering the data might change the gut feeling.

Yeah, interesting, good answer! I think that is the answer, and it actually does make sense to me. Often while gathering data I develop a better intuition for what I'm unable to gather data on, which definitely impacts my gut feel for things. The available data might point in one direction, intuition about the unavailable data might point the other way.

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