What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside.
Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves.
Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Who will do this at Amazon?
Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.
There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price.
Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era.
Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore.
The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc..
That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow,
Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did.
My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture.
Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.
From my recollection, Ballmer continually overpaid for random acquisitions that screamed “in the moment hot thing” versus well-thought, strategic. From an outsiders view, the whole we must take over the world syndrome manifested into trying to buy a way into everything that could be big versus fit well with Microsoft.
You mean like Google's $3.2 B acquisition of Nest, which has nothing to do with their core offer and is losing money? Or FitBit, another money losing entity for $2B? Or Alphalbet's other substantial moonshot investments none of which have panned out? They're all 'strategic' but that's what all bad investments are pinned as.
I think your statement might be driven by narrative (which is my point about Ballmer's public perception) because if you have a look at the acquisitions, I don't think MS comes out looking bad at all next to G.
Have a look at G's acquisitions [1] , and MS [2]
MSFT looks actually a little more tame by the numbers.
Satya will have to do much more than amp up all the products and services that Gates and Ballmer launched in order to keep the reputation he has right now.
I completely agree on Alphabet as of late. Maybe they can justify having a hardware division for phones as a necessary cost center in order to facilitate R&D developments for Android. I’d even give Veerily the benefit of the doubt as it seems to relate to cloud offerings for healthcare. Ballmer’s Microsoft era was similar to Google from 2014 onward.
Ballmer screamed about developers, developers, developers while steadily losing their love and mindshare by breaking their trust that time spent learning windows coding skills was economically valuable (particularly on GUI and front end tech). Satya is regaining that mindshare with open source initiatives, VS Code, proper management of C# and Typescript, and a cloud platform that is incredibly well suited to the needs of enterprise developers even if it's not as popular in the SF hacker community and here on HN. He's pivoted the perception of the company for the better among both investors and developers. Positive perceptions enabled Microsoft to generate significant wealth under Gates and Satya and negative perceptions prevented it under Ballmer. The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO and Ballmer was a dud bracketed by greats.
You need to provide some evidence of your positions otherwise I suggest it might just be more propagating narrative than anything reflecting what's really happening, which is again my overall point.
First off - opinions on HN don't matter at all.
Even the opinions of tech tastemakers often don't matter.
The vast majority of people in tech know nothing or care nothing of the personal disposition of Ballmer, Satya or Gates.
As you suggest 'perception matters' on some levels, but it's often not fundamental.
I'm doubtful at all that there was any material dissonance or embrace of MS technologies due to Ballmer v. Satya's approach.
Ballmer was by any reasonable measure, massively successful in growing MS developer mind share.
C# / .Net can only be described as a phenomenal success and this was mostly 'Ballmer era'.
Typescript, MS new daring web contribution was started under Ballmer, and it's also been important in terms of developing mind share.
MS VS Code was technically started under Ballmer, though it's possible he may have never supported it's release.
I think the failure of IE during the Ballmer era is a bad stain, but they were up against a good product as well (Chrome).
As for Satya - what products or initiatives has he launched that has improved MS position among developers? I think we can give him some credit for VS Code, what else?
Open Sourcing Chakra? That hasn't done much. Switching over to Edge/Chrome ... hasn't changed much.
Now let's consider the 'stock market attribution' issue.
" The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO "
So in early 2008, the majority of 'stock market' indicies would put most large bank CEO's in the 'good camp' but as it turns out they were completely wrong? Stock markets are often wrong.
What's at issue here is mostly market perceptions and macro fundamentals, not the assessment of CEOs.
In the early 2000's, P/E ratios in tech were not good, in 2009 obviously they crashed. Since then, we've seen increasing levels of liquidity from the Fed 'crazy market' valuations across the board. This has little to do with MS specifically.
Also in the 2000's MS had competitors in G and FB, investors were concerned about long term viability, keeping MSFT multiple specifically down a little. They thought Windows and Office were going to die. But this lack of foresight by analysts was wrong in retrospect wasn't it?
Windows is not dying.
Office is not dying esp. now that they are subscription + web.
The cloud is a big new business for MS, so are many of their other products.
In summary, almost everything Microsoft is today, is due to Gates and Ballmer. Were p/e ratios have been reasonable in perfect hindsight, the stock price would have reflected that and then some.
Satya has benefitted tremendously from the massive money making engine that Gates and Ballmer made, and it remains to be seen exactly what he will do that will make MS a fundamentally greater company.
I believe that Satya was the right choice for the right time, but that ultimately he will not be transformative on the level of either Gates or Ballmer. I don't think Satya is going to take MS into vast new lines of business, re-shaping what they are etc.. Instead - Satya will be guiding growth through a maturing of MS.
Sad to see this downvoted. Balmer moved MS into the cloud defeating IBM and into hardware over Gates' objections. He was imperfect and underrated. Microsoft under Nadella is built on Ballmer's shoulders.
Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?
The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade.
The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews.
It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China.
Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms.
Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.
Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.
That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the integration. AWS is just quietly milking the cash out of retail and funding the science projects.
Retail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.
Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books.
It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.
Downsizing back to books? That goes against every available metric.
Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.
Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.
Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.
You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?
> It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it.
Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.
So much of the result of a search is now explicitly advertising. Amazon now has a new incentive to sell ads and display those ads as often as possible, whereas before their only goal was to return relevant results to the customer making the search.
That hasn't been my experience at all, but the further point is that is all background stuff. They can improve the search without changing the UI, so it's not really a response to my point.
"Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."
So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
> "Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."
Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.
> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.
> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.
- For a long time they performed poorly on Firefox. Opening multiple tabs would cause my PC to come to a crawl. They fixed this 1-2 years ago.
- I used to be able to jump directly to reviews. Now it's multiple clicks away. One click to get to the review section. Then scroll down. Then click again. This is very annoying.
- I don't get notified when someone replies to my review. The rest of the world solved this problem well over 15 years ago.
- Lumping of quite different products into one listing, so when I'm reading reviews I can't easily tell if I'm reading the review for the product I want.
- Way too many gamed reviews out there. Whole web sites exist to handle this problem that Amazon has.
- Same item has multiple listings. Why?
I could list all the other problems that their retail division has, but the above is just about the web site. Whenever I hear that they are Customer Obsessed, I wonder which world they live in. As someone who buys stuff from them, and as someone who has sold stuff through them, neither experience could be classified as caring much for the customer.
Their retail division really does remind me of MS Windows and its stagnation, where MS wouldn't improve anything because of their dominance.
I think Amazon as a store is probably being deprioritized in favor of Amazon as a giant e-commerce facilitator that handles all the payment processing and backend logistics.
The consequence has been ruining the storefront experience, but that’s not really what they care about anymore.
Prime, Prime Now, Prime video with exclusive content, Audible, Amazon Go, Kindle, Amazon Lockers, 1 day shipping, Whole Foods, their own delivery services, supposedly drone delivery, market leading Cloud services, etc.
My husband and I invested north of $200K in Amazon back in 2014. Their stock alone has performed tremendously for me.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I haven’t cashed out. I’m betting on Papa Bezos for the long term.
One thing I respect about Amazon is how they figure out stuff that isn’t working and kill it. Amazon Restaurants is now gone.
I work at another big tech company - I’m in Kirkland ;) My employer pays me better than Amazon pays for a similar role, so I get best of both worlds...
Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.
They're simply ignoring massive rates of fraud in their store so they can profit from it, and have been for... what, over half of their existence, at this point? ("oh but we're trying, no really we are, but it's just soooooo hard" uh how about you shut off the features that enable massive amounts of fraud until you can fix it, then, and if you can't fix it I guess you'll have to leave them off? Oh, right, you're making mountains of money from it, I forgot)
I frankly can't believe the way the operate is anywhere near legal.
I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now.
As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.
The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory.
Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.
Exactly. Amazon is still well in the lead. They have likely analyzed this entire problem with news and features scheduled over the next 2 years to resolve it as soon as their competitors gain any real ground.
You seem to be looking at this as a consumer who got a fake item (from a 3rd-party seller). Store experience is not the same as business execution.
The company is operating optimally, making the most revenue with the most growth while controlling costs and taking market share from all of its rivals. Nothing's perfect, but this is as close as you can get with a trillion dollar company that remains in the lead and is pulling even further ahead.
I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies.
> I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summary of the habits of alumni from management consulting firms.
Rather than just denouncing something without explaining it, it would be better if you described what your experience was and how you arrived at these conclusions. That would gratify curiosity more.
> Amazon’s hard-driving company culture has come in for its share of criticism...
Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]?
> Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly.
AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this.
> Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance.
This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10].
My criticism of Amazon's values are (1) they are (generally) not values and (2) they can be used to justify essentially any action. We tried to be mindful of that with Oxide's values which are very much values (and not management bromides or all-hands claptrap) and we are explicit about the fact that (as values) they can come into tension: we explicitly ask applicants to describe a time when two of our values have come into tension for them and how they've resolved it.[1] (The answers have honestly been incredible: many are deeply thoughtful, insightful and inspiring!)
So you may believe that we missed the mark, but Oxide's values are in contrast to Amazon's -- aligned only in the belief that a company's values should be articulated clearly and referred to frequently.
Honestly, we just sat down and figured out the values that really bonded us: values that we deeply shared, not merely aspired to. There are some values in there that are subtler than they look -- but that the three of us hold very deeply...
Thank you. Another follow-up if you don't mind: have you and the others considering ranking Oxide's values separately, and then coming together to determine their hierarchy? It would help a candidate to know which values are more deeply shared, equally shared, or less shared by their own leaders.
That's a great question, but honestly, we deeply share all of them -- so much so that it's very hard to rank them. And not because each is unequivocally good! Indeed, each of these values can be taken to excess and must be held on tension by the others. So it's hard to imagine any of them taken away -- or valued to the exclusion of the others. (With my apologies for the profoundly unhelpful answer!)
Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.
Throwaway account because I don’t want my primary account to be associated with my career in any way.
I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means that place won’t be around very long.
Given the number of people Amazon employs, I’m sure some people aren’t the most flattering, but to say we’re conditioning anyone to be assholes isn’t based on reality at all.
Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along.
The leadership principles give you cover to be an asshole, and justify it, and turn off questioning of whether what you did was the right thing afterwards. It turns off your empathy. Want to justify screwing over a customer? Just say that someone else is actually the customer.
The common response is that one just doesn’t get it well enough if they have criticisms. That’s what you call a cult. You are the machine that is plowing through businesses and people. Sometimes the field really looks better afterwards, but your paycheck depends on never really looking at the side effects.
Amazon is a big company so there’ll always be exceptions, so take anything with a grain of salt if it doesn’t match your experience. My opinion is people who do well at Amazon develop a hard edge over time, by design, and that edge frequently makes them into the productive jerk archetype.
I was just reading here on HN how Amazon recently quietly replicated and replaced UPS and FedEx with their own fleet. These companies are $82.92 billion and $65.45 billion companies respectively so I was pretty impressed.
I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping.
Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque.
"Hi I have not received my package which says it was delivered at a time when I was home"
"Let me check the tracking, sir it shows that you have received the package"
"I have not, no delivery was attempted"
"Yes you are right you will receive your package shortly"
I gave up and moved entirely to using the lockers when I order from amazon now. Curiously they still managed to lose a package between the last distribution center and their locker.
But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring more workers, giving more reasonable workloads, and providing incentives to actual get the job done right instead of lying to try and meet their numbers.
I had a package shipped to a locker. Delivery date comes and I get a notification that the driver couldn't complete the delivery because the location was inaccessible. Perhaps I "locked out the mailbox" the email says. I call them up to ask how I supposedly locked them out of their own locker, which is in the middle of a public mall. They assure me the driver will "try again" tomorrow. The status goes back to in-progress, then "location inaccessible" again, and finally "package damaged" a couple hours after. I don't know whether it was always damaged, or it got damaged in the process of not delivering it, but neither is a good look. Amazon automatically refunds me, presumably so I stop messing with the delivery time average. How its possible to screw up what's essentially an internal shipment so bad I don't know.
I went to buy it from the manufacturer's website instead. Ships without trouble right to my apartment, and I don't have to worry if I'm buying damaged goods, a knock-off, or some garbage. Someone is doing some terrible Pinto-style calculations, shaving pennies here and there while losing pounds building a delivery network that gets 'most' packages 'somewhere', 'most' of the time.
A local Amazon delivery driver was just found to have been taking the photos then swiping the package. The only reason he was caught was someones Ring doorbell. If anything the package photos are to help Amazon refute claims.
I don't know the pay structure for Amazon drivers, but I would not be surprised that we are giving up "trustworthy" drivers for the cheapest option Amazon can provide at scale. I've heard working at UPS as a driver is a great job long-term for some people perhaps leading to more integrity, but I'm just speculating. Maybe I'm wrong but I trust UPS or FedEx with my packages more than Amazon or their flex drivers.
I have frequently had packages marked as delivered that were not delivered. When I contacted Amazon they would say if it does not show up in a day or two contact us again and they would also give me a $5 gift card. The package would always show up just like they said. It's pretty obvious that the drivers are lying about the delivery (due to aggressive quotas, I assume) and it's obvious that Amazon is aware of the problem because they have a pat answer when you contact them.
I have also had many packages marked as undeliverable for any number of completely made up reason. Reasons such as: no access code (not a gated community, no access code required), nobody in the office to receive the package (it's a condo, not apartments, there is no office), no safe place to leave the package (there is a six foot privacy fence around the front porch), could not find the address (receive multiple packages a week without issue), etc. These packages would always show up the next day proving these were completely fabricated excuses.
You got that right. I can’t even get them to deliver reliably to my mailbox at a UPS store. It’s like they just can’t figure out that it’s a business with business hours or something, even though I have it in the delivery instructions for that address. Either that, or they’re just straight lying like you said, but I’ve had enough repeated problems that I just suspect incompetence.
I once went so far as to try and get Amazon to blacklist my address for their contracted delivery drivers, but, of course, they wouldn’t do it.
It's ironic that we've found ourselves facing the same problem we criticized the Soviets for when they constantly fudged their metrics in order to meet their quotas.
I don't really know what people expect from a workforce that's underpaid, without benefits, and completely at-will employed.
If you want people to give a fuck about their job, pay them enough to live comfortably off of it. Give them benefits so they can feel secure. Give them paid time off, proper breaks, etc.
It's a little gross how people bitch and complain about service and low-tier labor workers "just being there for the paycheck" as though a single person ever finished high school with the dream of working as an Amazon delivery driver.
Asshole managers who copy Jeff Bezos are just this tech generation's version of asshole managers who copied Steve Jobs that we had to deal with 20 years ago.
Was it cool to copy Jobs 20 years ago, after NeXT but before OS X, iPod, and iPhone? I don't think so.
Was it cool to copy his asshole traits before he was kicked out the first time? I would have been too young to know. I am not sure how widely they were publicized.
Anyway, I am not the biggest Amazon fan, but if what they are imitating are things like "customer focus" as claimed in the article and it's not a euphemism or lip service then that sounds good. Seems like they could do that without being jerks too.
I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story and Jobs had been Acqui-hired back by Apple. OS X, iPod, and iPhone are far from his first successes.
Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along.
One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.
I think some of this view of Jobs needs to be anchored to the subsequent successes. Imagine if he had rejoined in '96 [when Apple seemed doomed] but then didn't churn out a bunch of successful projects ... In 1999 the outcome wasn't clear yet.
I totally believe you on terms like "bar raiser" and "accountability". (Never worked at Amazon but did have a stint in Seattle). These are tingling my "corporate bullshit" senses strongly. But I'll still say a term like "customer focus", if it's correctly applied, is very important.
I can appreciate the sentiment behind not saying that something “isn’t my job.” But that’s also a quick road to people shaming and guilting one another into doing work they think needs to be done, regardless of what the hierarchy thinks should be done. Simple answers usually aren’t the right ones.
Trustworthy product reviews, higher quality products, fewer/zero counterfeits, reliable shipping (based on arrival), and/or secure and convenient pickup at more accessible locations.
Subscription services (StitchFix, BarkBox, etc) and manufacturer direct (Drop.com, there are others) seem to be doing fine without 2day shipping on every product in existence. Probably because their customers are getting good products delivered reliably.
92 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadThat shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside.
Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves.
Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Who will do this at Amazon?
Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era.
Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore.
The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc..
That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow,
Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did.
My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture.
Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
I think your statement might be driven by narrative (which is my point about Ballmer's public perception) because if you have a look at the acquisitions, I don't think MS comes out looking bad at all next to G.
Have a look at G's acquisitions [1] , and MS [2]
MSFT looks actually a little more tame by the numbers.
Satya will have to do much more than amp up all the products and services that Gates and Ballmer launched in order to keep the reputation he has right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Ballmer re-orged MSFT's entire business model, and launched most of the platforms and services from which they derive their revenue today.
What has Satya done, materially, do improve MS revenue? In terns of new products, services or op models, etc?
We all love MS code, but it's not that important. Linux on Azure was a market-driven inevitability.
We'll have to wait and see to really judge, just as it's only really now becoming clear what Ballmer did and did not.
First off - opinions on HN don't matter at all.
Even the opinions of tech tastemakers often don't matter.
The vast majority of people in tech know nothing or care nothing of the personal disposition of Ballmer, Satya or Gates.
As you suggest 'perception matters' on some levels, but it's often not fundamental.
I'm doubtful at all that there was any material dissonance or embrace of MS technologies due to Ballmer v. Satya's approach.
Ballmer was by any reasonable measure, massively successful in growing MS developer mind share.
C# / .Net can only be described as a phenomenal success and this was mostly 'Ballmer era'.
Typescript, MS new daring web contribution was started under Ballmer, and it's also been important in terms of developing mind share.
MS VS Code was technically started under Ballmer, though it's possible he may have never supported it's release.
I think the failure of IE during the Ballmer era is a bad stain, but they were up against a good product as well (Chrome).
As for Satya - what products or initiatives has he launched that has improved MS position among developers? I think we can give him some credit for VS Code, what else?
Open Sourcing Chakra? That hasn't done much. Switching over to Edge/Chrome ... hasn't changed much.
Now let's consider the 'stock market attribution' issue.
" The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO "
So in early 2008, the majority of 'stock market' indicies would put most large bank CEO's in the 'good camp' but as it turns out they were completely wrong? Stock markets are often wrong.
What's at issue here is mostly market perceptions and macro fundamentals, not the assessment of CEOs.
In the early 2000's, P/E ratios in tech were not good, in 2009 obviously they crashed. Since then, we've seen increasing levels of liquidity from the Fed 'crazy market' valuations across the board. This has little to do with MS specifically.
Also in the 2000's MS had competitors in G and FB, investors were concerned about long term viability, keeping MSFT multiple specifically down a little. They thought Windows and Office were going to die. But this lack of foresight by analysts was wrong in retrospect wasn't it?
Windows is not dying.
Office is not dying esp. now that they are subscription + web.
The cloud is a big new business for MS, so are many of their other products.
In summary, almost everything Microsoft is today, is due to Gates and Ballmer. Were p/e ratios have been reasonable in perfect hindsight, the stock price would have reflected that and then some.
Satya has benefitted tremendously from the massive money making engine that Gates and Ballmer made, and it remains to be seen exactly what he will do that will make MS a fundamentally greater company.
I believe that Satya was the right choice for the right time, but that ultimately he will not be transformative on the level of either Gates or Ballmer. I don't think Satya is going to take MS into vast new lines of business, re-shaping what they are etc.. Instead - Satya will be guiding growth through a maturing of MS.
A footnote: Amazon is approaching a 1,000,000 employees.
Is Amazon really stagnating? They still seem to be making a ton of moves from my casual observation.
The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews.
It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China.
Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms.
What a wonderful world.
Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com
"Retail is already dead?"
By what metric. Please enlighten us how people buying things is not a massive lever to the economy and Amazon's success?
Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books.
It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.
Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.
Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.
Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.
Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.
> It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.
You are talking about functionality, and I am responding about Amazon's functionality.
You don't get to tell me what my point was and you certainly don't get to argue with me about what my point is.
The person I responded to said the website hasn't changed. I read that as a redesign of the site itself.
Now, there's nothing wrong if you read it differently. Where you stepped over the line is when you decided to argue with me about what my point is.
You said one thing, which I replied to, and now you're claiming it's another thing. I'm not really sure what you expect when you do that.
So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.
> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.
> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.
- For a long time they performed poorly on Firefox. Opening multiple tabs would cause my PC to come to a crawl. They fixed this 1-2 years ago.
- I used to be able to jump directly to reviews. Now it's multiple clicks away. One click to get to the review section. Then scroll down. Then click again. This is very annoying.
- I don't get notified when someone replies to my review. The rest of the world solved this problem well over 15 years ago.
- Lumping of quite different products into one listing, so when I'm reading reviews I can't easily tell if I'm reading the review for the product I want.
- Way too many gamed reviews out there. Whole web sites exist to handle this problem that Amazon has.
- Same item has multiple listings. Why?
I could list all the other problems that their retail division has, but the above is just about the web site. Whenever I hear that they are Customer Obsessed, I wonder which world they live in. As someone who buys stuff from them, and as someone who has sold stuff through them, neither experience could be classified as caring much for the customer.
Their retail division really does remind me of MS Windows and its stagnation, where MS wouldn't improve anything because of their dominance.
The consequence has been ruining the storefront experience, but that’s not really what they care about anymore.
Where did Jeff Bezos say this?
Employees frequently use that framework to discuss how they think Amazon (or the org they work in) is truly done for.
My husband and I invested north of $200K in Amazon back in 2014. Their stock alone has performed tremendously for me.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I haven’t cashed out. I’m betting on Papa Bezos for the long term.
One thing I respect about Amazon is how they figure out stuff that isn’t working and kill it. Amazon Restaurants is now gone.
I work at another big tech company - I’m in Kirkland ;) My employer pays me better than Amazon pays for a similar role, so I get best of both worlds...
I do have friends at Amazon as well.
Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".
I frankly can't believe the way the operate is anywhere near legal.
As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.
The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory.
Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.
Exactly. Amazon is still well in the lead. They have likely analyzed this entire problem with news and features scheduled over the next 2 years to resolve it as soon as their competitors gain any real ground.
The company is operating optimally, making the most revenue with the most growth while controlling costs and taking market share from all of its rivals. Nothing's perfect, but this is as close as you can get with a trillion dollar company that remains in the lead and is pulling even further ahead.
And funny thing, it sometimes is a success.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summary of the habits of alumni from management consulting firms.
It gives me a headache that founders who previously worked at Amazon would want to promote the "culture" dissonance of Amazon at their own companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]?
> Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly.
AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this.
> Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance.
This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10].
--
[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc
[1] https://oxide.computer/principles/
[2] Marc Brooker, Amazon's approach to building resilient services, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44
[3] Peter Ramensky, Amazon's approach to high-availability deployment, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4
[4] Andy Troutman, Amazon's approach to running service-oriented teams, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000
[5] Colm MacCarthaigh, Amazon's approach to security during development, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ
[6] Becky Weiss, Amazon's approach to failing successfully, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU
[7] Thomas Blood, Amazon's culture of innovation, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE
[8] Andy Warfield and Seth Markle, Lessons from Amazon S3's culture of durability, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0
[9] Colm MacCarthaigh, Lessons from Amazon's highest available data-planes, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo
[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526
So you may believe that we missed the mark, but Oxide's values are in contrast to Amazon's -- aligned only in the belief that a company's values should be articulated clearly and referred to frequently.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAK...
Gitlab describes this concept here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy
I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means that place won’t be around very long.
Given the number of people Amazon employs, I’m sure some people aren’t the most flattering, but to say we’re conditioning anyone to be assholes isn’t based on reality at all.
Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along.
I was nodding along until this line. The fact that you would phrase it this way makes it hard for me to trust whatever you said earlier.
A predictable pattern.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695
The common response is that one just doesn’t get it well enough if they have criticisms. That’s what you call a cult. You are the machine that is plowing through businesses and people. Sometimes the field really looks better afterwards, but your paycheck depends on never really looking at the side effects.
Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque.
"Hi I have not received my package which says it was delivered at a time when I was home"
"Let me check the tracking, sir it shows that you have received the package"
"I have not, no delivery was attempted"
"Yes you are right you will receive your package shortly"
But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring more workers, giving more reasonable workloads, and providing incentives to actual get the job done right instead of lying to try and meet their numbers.
I went to buy it from the manufacturer's website instead. Ships without trouble right to my apartment, and I don't have to worry if I'm buying damaged goods, a knock-off, or some garbage. Someone is doing some terrible Pinto-style calculations, shaving pennies here and there while losing pounds building a delivery network that gets 'most' packages 'somewhere', 'most' of the time.
I don't know the pay structure for Amazon drivers, but I would not be surprised that we are giving up "trustworthy" drivers for the cheapest option Amazon can provide at scale. I've heard working at UPS as a driver is a great job long-term for some people perhaps leading to more integrity, but I'm just speculating. Maybe I'm wrong but I trust UPS or FedEx with my packages more than Amazon or their flex drivers.
I have frequently had packages marked as delivered that were not delivered. When I contacted Amazon they would say if it does not show up in a day or two contact us again and they would also give me a $5 gift card. The package would always show up just like they said. It's pretty obvious that the drivers are lying about the delivery (due to aggressive quotas, I assume) and it's obvious that Amazon is aware of the problem because they have a pat answer when you contact them.
I have also had many packages marked as undeliverable for any number of completely made up reason. Reasons such as: no access code (not a gated community, no access code required), nobody in the office to receive the package (it's a condo, not apartments, there is no office), no safe place to leave the package (there is a six foot privacy fence around the front porch), could not find the address (receive multiple packages a week without issue), etc. These packages would always show up the next day proving these were completely fabricated excuses.
I once went so far as to try and get Amazon to blacklist my address for their contracted delivery drivers, but, of course, they wouldn’t do it.
If you want people to give a fuck about their job, pay them enough to live comfortably off of it. Give them benefits so they can feel secure. Give them paid time off, proper breaks, etc.
It's a little gross how people bitch and complain about service and low-tier labor workers "just being there for the paycheck" as though a single person ever finished high school with the dream of working as an Amazon delivery driver.
Was it cool to copy his asshole traits before he was kicked out the first time? I would have been too young to know. I am not sure how widely they were publicized.
Anyway, I am not the biggest Amazon fan, but if what they are imitating are things like "customer focus" as claimed in the article and it's not a euphemism or lip service then that sounds good. Seems like they could do that without being jerks too.
Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along.
One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.
I totally believe you on terms like "bar raiser" and "accountability". (Never worked at Amazon but did have a stint in Seattle). These are tingling my "corporate bullshit" senses strongly. But I'll still say a term like "customer focus", if it's correctly applied, is very important.
How do you beat AWS?
How do you survive if Jeff Bezos has his eyes on your market?
Could an antitrust case break them up?
Trustworthy product reviews, higher quality products, fewer/zero counterfeits, reliable shipping (based on arrival), and/or secure and convenient pickup at more accessible locations.
Subscription services (StitchFix, BarkBox, etc) and manufacturer direct (Drop.com, there are others) seem to be doing fine without 2day shipping on every product in existence. Probably because their customers are getting good products delivered reliably.