
Amazon: The Everything Company - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2014/01/amazon-everything-company.html
======
incision
_> "Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens
(perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work."_

Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business
practices.

 _> "For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort
in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all
about customer service."_

Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and
stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago.

Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me
when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video
hiccups.

Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those
places, they did it to themselves, years ago.

~~~
cyanbane
A few months ago I preordered a video game, upon receipt of the game months
latter I also received an email that stated that Amz had lowered the price of
the game in the time span of between my preorder and delivery of the game.
They issued me a refund for the difference. It was something on the nature of
.03, but impressive none the less.

A few months ago they went back through all the physical books I have ordered
over the past 10 years and gifted me electronic versions of a subset of them.

They did the same with all my music purchased physically a few months
previous.

I have never dealt with returns or the like with their customer service, but
the channels in which they can deliver (physical + digital) is perfect for the
time period we are currently in as physical mediums start to fall off.

------
goodside
"This is a company that wants to be the single-source provisioner of both the
protons and electrons in your world. It wants to sell you physical books (and
other physical goods; the protons) as well as electronic books (electrons)."

If your cute metaphor needs explaining, don't use it.

~~~
lucozade
Implying that Amazon have missed the whole neutron market. An opportunity
perchance?

------
tokenadult
Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page
again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog
post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from
any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried
about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all).

Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN
readers:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734)

by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:

> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a
> blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of
> 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they
> included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were
> sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures
> discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] [http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-
stop-h...](http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-
your-data.html%E3%80%80)

> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen
> anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog)

That was followed up by another set of comments:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084)

> I'm beginning to flag these posts.

I agree.

~~~
BraveNewCurency
Seconded. The article doesn't even have thesis. It implies that
automation/ecommerce is bad (because it's putting people out of jobs) and AWS
is somehow spying on the computers it hosts (without proof that it's
happening, or even that it is possible.)

------
robryk
> No one's suggesting Amazon is actually going to spy on your business's bits
> and bytes (which are already encrypted anyway, right?) ...

I don't get it. If I use the data in any way other than simply storing and
retrieving it, I'd expect the decryption keys (ignoring very few situations,
in which we are able to compute on encrypted data) to reside on the machines
that provide the service, which are posited to be on EC2. So how does
encryption protect anything from Amazon?

~~~
lcampbell
Given the plethora of AWS services, the author may have been referring to S3
or RDS. The whole piece read like fire and brimstone, so I wouldn't
necessarily give it the benefit of the doubt. There's plenty of other
hyperbole in there, gems like:

> [Amazon lets] you use [EC2] for pennies per hour.

The author's probably referring to micro instances; everything else costs
upwards of a dime. For large scale deployments, EC2 is everything except
cheap.

------
wandernotlost
So basically, Amazon is making new businesses so efficient, they're putting
old businesses out of business. So if you're an old business, you should avoid
using Amazon's tech to be more like a new business, because...Amazon might
someday compete with you and put you out of business? Somehow this does not
seem like sound business decision making.

------
blueskin_
For half a second, I wondered if the link was just going to be one of those
novelty sites that just shows a giant "NO".

(like
[http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/](http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/)
)

------
andrewgjohnson
I've been shocked by the caliber of Amazon's customer service. Pleasantly
shocked that is. Also imagine AWS has at least some privacy controls. I find
it unlikely Bezos has Netflix's monthly AWS bcced to him in secret.

------
Ihmahr
I was at a meeting a week ago and there was the CTO of amazon.

He was speaking about how you could do 'secure and trusted' computations on
untrusted platforms, and how your users would definitely be safe when you run
your services on AWS, EVEN IF they would be in bed with intelligence community
(which he denied). He went on to say how safe AWS was and how it was
technically impossible to spy on their customers. It was at this event:
[http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-
connected](http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected) Not a
particularly technical crowd he spoke to, and there was no room for audience
questions.

He seemed like a genuine peace of shit when it came to respect for privacy and
telling the truth.

~~~
res0nat0r
I'm sure Werner would appreciate some evidence to back up your statement that
he is a piece of shit.

------
judk
I am convinced regarding Bits, but the case against Bytes wasn't persuasive.

------
azinman2
FUD.

------
spacefight
No, you shouldn't. I don't.

~~~
nobodysfool
Oh, well if spacefight doesn't trust his bits there, I certainly can't. I
mean, who can we trust if not spacefight?

