
How Bezos built his data machine - colinprince
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/CLQYZENMBI/amazon-data
======
Diederich
This is an interesting article, but I'd like to bring some attention to a bit
of relevant history. From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dalzell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dalzell)

"Prior to joining Amazon.com in 1997, Dalzell was vice president of
information systems at Wal-Mart starting in 1990. At Walmart he developed
their datawarehouse strategy from the ground up, giving their suppliers direct
access to demographic sales information."

[https://www.cnet.com/news/wal-mart-sues-amazon-
others/](https://www.cnet.com/news/wal-mart-sues-amazon-others/)

"Then, in July, Amazon hired Jimmy Wright as vice president and chief
logistics officer. Wright worked for Wal-Mart for 13 years, serving as a "key
logistics leader," according to Amazon.

Observers say Wal-Mart, one of the world's largest retailers, prides itself on
its computerized supply chain and retail management system and is aggressive
in protecting it. "

I was working in WalMart Information Systems Division at the time, and
Dalzell's exit, along with some others, was a Big Deal. We had meetings about
it.

At the time, I and pretty much all of my peers thought the internal reaction
was kind of absurd. WalMart was, in the late 1990s, ascendant in many ways,
and Amazon was just some 'west coast dot com selling CDs and books in the
mail'.

Funny story: in 1997, we were deploying routers to over 2000 WalMart stores
worldwide, and they were made by a company called "Advanced Computer
Communications". We didn't switch over to Cisco routers for a couple of years,
because the ACC routers properly supported SNA protocol encapsulation and
Cisco didn't. Anyway, the name of the ACC routers we were buying was 'Amazon',
which, I was told later, momentarily caused some panic and confusion in senior
leadership.

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whyenot
I don't know how I feel about this. I have been an Amazon customer since 1996,
and the company almost certainly has data on me for a period spanning more
than half of my life, including very private things like information on my
medical history.

On the other hand, I have also owned Amazon stock since shortly after their
IPO, and at some level have financially benefitted from all the data that the
company has gathered on its customers.

~~~
dx034
Amazon has a similar amount of data on me. And yet, their product
recommendations are never really helpful. A toddler would probably be better
at recommending products for me than Amazon is. So I'm not sure if the amount
of data actually helps them financially.

~~~
pantsforbirds
I am constantly creeped out by how well Amazon markets things to me.

There are two types of recommendations I get from Amazon though. The first is
ads I see on sites like Facebook and are things I would never look up, but I'm
also curious if that is part of their strategy. I get ads on facebook for
things like a unicycle that is motorized and can go like 35mph. Half the time
I end up clicking on these insane ads just to read reviews or the description.

The on site recommendations work very well for me though (they know I love
woodworking and Cooking/Kitchen stuff).

I'm curious if the outrageous ads are to get you on site, then the targeted
on-site ads are to actually get you to buy things?

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PaulDavisThe1st
Hint: Reader Mode [ enabled ]

This is a horrible presentation but reader mode makes it much better.

~~~
ActorNightly
+1

I am big in MTB community, and horrible presentation is super prevalent on
quite a few websites for brands.

Perhaps the worst example:
[https://www.yeticycles.com/bikes/sb165](https://www.yeticycles.com/bikes/sb165)

~~~
m0zg
How else are you going to sell some rich idiot an $8K _bicycle_?

~~~
inopinatus
I had no idea it was possible to obtain one so cheaply.

------
topicseed
For UK-based visitors, it's alongside the release of a Panorama episode on
Amazon:

Panorama, Amazon: What They Know About Us:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000fjdz](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000fjdz)

~~~
detritus
mm. this is what annoys me a bit with BBC online - much of their interesting
content is simply promotional fluffing for TV media they have on otherwise.

I get why they do it and don't particularly feel they shouldn't - but there's
been so many times I've clicked on ostensibly interesting articles on the BBC
website only to find it's just a mechanism to encourage me to watch TV...
which I try to avoid.

------
jaybeeayyy
Is anyone else always bothered by titles that make these celebrity CEOs sound
like they did everything single-handedly on their own? Why can't we credit the
teams of people that did all the work instead?

~~~
Gys
I think for some CEOs it is actually applicable. Bezos being one of them. He
has build Amazon from scratch. Sure he hired lots and lots of people to help
him. But hiring the right people at the right moment is not easy and very,
very important. Many startups fail at exactly that point.

~~~
travisjungroth
So Bezos gave other people’s money to other people, they built something, and
he deserves _all_ the credit?

~~~
mirthflat83
Yes, he deserves the majority of the credit. Why do you think CEOs exist?

~~~
kingkawn
To take credit for things they themselves didn’t do

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pastor_elm
>One database contains transcriptions of all 31,082 interactions my family has
had with the virtual assistant Alexa. Audio clips of the recordings are also
provided.

>The 48 requests to play Let It Go, flag my daughter’s infatuation with
Disney’s Frozen.

So does Amazon tag voices to specific people too? Seems like a no brainer to
start collecting data on a little kid if you can, legality aside. I wonder.

Also, if i set up a pi that just continually spams Alexa with random voice
generated questions, will they ever figure it out and stop saving those
recordings?

~~~
sjg007
I think Alexa can be customized to recognize specific voices now but that's a
recent feature.

------
willberman
I haven't come to a personal conclusion on how I feel about the morals of it
all, but you have to marvel at the feat of engineering.

~~~
femto113
Marvel at the feat of operations, not the engineering. The techniques used to
process this information over the years have mostly been quite banal. Look
behind the scenes and much of it is just batch processes written in old school
languages (Perl, Java, even C) reading text files from one folder, filtering
or enhancing them, and writing them out to another. I once taught a PM how to
use a Perl hash to do a join instead of nested for loops and she spent the
next year feeling godlike because she could do this stuff in O(n) instead of
O(n^2).

~~~
auggierose
What’s a PM, prime minister?

~~~
capableweb
Because of the context, I'd assume "Project Manager", basically a low-level
manager of sorts.

~~~
femto113
At Amazon "Program Manager", in this case really was a TPM or "Technical
Program Manager". TPMs are effectively serial project managers, often charged
with shepherding complex projects that require the efforts of more than one
business or development group. Dealing with the data produced by those
projects sometimes fell on them since it was difficult enough to persuade the
developers to write the primary functionality.

