
Amazon.com is too powerful - sweetdreams
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ulin28-2009jul28,0,2451238.story?track=notottext
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Kirby
This person is not, and has never been, a software developer.

I take issue with: "Such issues have been largely overlooked in the Amazon.com
discussion, which takes for granted that "glitches" are inevitable and self-
correcting, that the market will police itself. (We've seen how well that
worked on Wall Street.)"

In a very large, very complex application like Amazon.com, glitches _are_
inevitable. They're not self correcting - there are hundreds of highly
competent, highly intelligent software engineers that correct them. It's not
Wall Street, where people have an incentive to game the system and naturally
collude to do so. It's doing something profoundly more complicated than most
people really have a conception of, and not being able to execute flawlessly
all the time.

Amazon fully deserves the heat for the 1984 debacle, and their communication
left a lot to be desired in the politically sensitive, but probably actually a
bug, issue that delisted large swaths of gay literature (while embarrassingly
leaving anti-gay rhetoric as the primary search results).

But this author seems to think the reaction is to attribute some sort of
malice to the entire culture of software engineering, that we accept some
level of imperfection and bug fixing in a major project. This is just not a
reasonable expectation, and it does nobody any good. Some companies may not
spend enough on QA and testing (and I'm sure more than half of you just
thought of the same company), but this stuff is hard, and there will be bugs,
and we'll try to fix them, and we really don't need some knucklehead from the
L.A. Times trying to infer about a process that's too complicated most times
for the managers at Amazon itself to really have a handle on.

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tjic
I love it when folks from the old media, who can't figure out how to provide
fact-checked news, distinguish opinions from data, disclose ideological
conflicts, or CREATE PROFITS lecture the online world about how we're DOING IT
WRONG.

Oh noz! Amazon has made a few small missteps over the years. The sky is
falling!

~~~
tdavis
The "1984 take-back" was a huge blunder, but it didn't affect _my_ copy of
1984, so the blanket statement that they're becoming "too powerful" seems a
bit alarmist. The gay/lesbian book delisting was a clever hack and only made
me laugh. I stopped reading after that.

In summary: EVERYBODY PANIC!!1

