Even 6 months ago when I told people I thought Amazon was an all-around shitty company (having worked there) and shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as Google, FB, etc., people looked at me like I was insane.
Somehow the stock keeps going up... I don't have any material insider info but just on a hunch I doubt that will remain true forever.
- If you can get something for free because it's included in Prime, it still offers the ability to spend money on it, right beside the 'watch now for free'. If you're not paying attention, you can pay for something you already own.
- Its killer feature is voice recognition. Say 'game of thrones' and it will play Game of Thrones. It also has apps. The killer feature doesn't actually work in apps though: if you say 'game of thrones' in Netflix, it kicks you out of the app and sends you back to the home screen.
There was a post a little while ago about people wrecking their lives while working at Amazon. I could understand, but not support, someone doing that at say Apple or Tesla. But Amazon?
Between this, inscrutable device compatibility of Kindle content, and 2-day delivery becoming unreliable, I'm cancelling Prime after a decade because the value is gone.
BTW, Netflix lacks voice search in all of its apps. Normal Android TV is at least reasonable enough to just bring up the Netflix text search if you try to voice search, rather than kicking you out.
Perhaps I am just old but voice recognition is a great feature, but not one that would "kill" the competition or make me chuck my AppleTV 3rd. gen in the bin to rush out and buy an Amazon device. I would therefore not label it "killer".
Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit.
Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.
I can go on and on. But generally the place is ran like it's a sales company primarily. Not an engineering company.
Amazon has a cancer through out it. It's basically a shitty copy of Microsoft without any of the virtues..but all the vices.
Not to mention, it says a lot that they have no perks except "free tea." 12 Leadership principles, which are dumb shit like "Be curious", "Have instinct."
Amazon doesn't have the brightest or the best - they have sheep that get tangled in the middle, or assholes that somehow become management. The company is only surviving because it set its margins so low that no one else could compete.
But now market leaders are sprouting out. Chewy.com for pet food. Walmart.com for general goods. Drugstore.com / Soap.com / Walgreens.com, the list goes on.
With such a shitty internal culture, Amazon will fall. I will have a shit-eating grin when that happens.
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Amazon Web Services was their saving grace. But having seen internally how each team has different practices, different tech..some that are arcane and esoteric. Theres no cohesion. Even the CSS for Amazon, theres no sheet that is shared. Each team has to hard-rip the colors and whatnot from other projects like the retail site.
Makes me totally re-evaluate AWS after seeing how its built internally.
The charm of AWS is that every service in that goddamn console looks like its a polished part of a pyramid of engineering sanctity.
Heh, wrong. Each service...written by a different team, with totally different methods, totally different tech. Some teams even use .NET and IIS... You can probably probe the endpoints to some of these services and maybe see it externally. But well, take my word for it.
Once a team has a decent AWS project, they slap together a new logo. Make the UI blend with the existing panel. And then scale it using existing AWS services. But it still is a hydra of mismatched code.
The whole thing is a frankenturd - they did a good job with the design, ui, and IAM policies to make these services look like they are all part of the same cohesive development. But it simply isn't the case. AWS is patched together like a paranoid android on the inside.
If Google and Facebook are cities, Amazon is more like an army. Can be city-scale depending on the nature of the conflict. They have great power, and in some ways the very same kind of power as a government. But at the same time the power structure is more ad-hoc, and subject to falling into collapse or docility when not led by a strong leader.
In some ways, I think Steve Jobs realized the was more in he Bezos category, and that Apple couldn't really carry on without him. So he deliberately changed his management style, developing a leadership class and stronger cultural inertia in terms of process and values. He wanted to leave a city behind him, not a headless army.
I suspect that the delay you see is in the time it takes their warehouse not only to package your goods, but to also privately deliver it through their network to the most optimal ship point. You also have to factor in whether the carrier they've chosen supports delivery on the days you expect the item to ship.
Amazon should really make the difference between processing and shipping clearer, and perhaps factor it into the delivery estimates when you purchase. I've also always wanted them to let you chose carriers if you pay for a certain delivery speed instead of picking one themselves. I always have to cross my fingers that I don't get USPS for that important item.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#List_of_pr...
Putting that aside, I'm not sure "why aren't people complaining?" is a reasonable way to prove or disprove how buggy software is.
Bezos on the other hand, made the Fire phone team answer to him (similar to Jobs bullying, without any of the mythical stories..) Yet the product he made them create was a total miss with consumers. As egotistical and deluded people might say Jobs was - he still had to be aligned with the needs of the average person to produce the iPhone, a masterful manifestation of usability principles.
Bezos is chaotic, sure. But more damning, he is out of touch.
Customers care about deliverables, not elegance.
Besides, bad repetitive code almost always results in bugs. If there were a ten commandments of programming, that would be #1.