
The Amazon Machine - runesoerensen
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/12/12/the-amazon-machine
======
throwawayamzn88
From the inside, it feels as though the machine is breaking down.

Some easy to point out problems today: hiring freeze for a large swath of the
company; the loss of the very-controversial feedback system[0]; changing
leadership principles to remove 'vocally self-critical'; anti-customer
behavior like removing Chromecasts.

The biggest change that I see is the bureaucracy taking over. A metrics driven
company has become a game of who can lie the best with statistics. The
leadership principles aren't nearly as important as making your numbers look
good.

When problems happen, mechanisms like Cause-Of-Error reports, previously used
to solve the root problem, become weapons to use against rivals. Blame is the
name of the game, not solving problems. And of course you can't make any
change without spending a day writing a request to make the change and getting
5 levels of managers to approve it.

I think it will get worse. I think it's what will cause Amazon to eventually
fail. A body growing fat and old, losing it's ability to fight off real
cancers.

[0] It was sometimes misused, but the anytime feedback system and end of year
feedback helped me grow as a human. I miss it.

~~~
beastcoast
Amazon is so decentralized that the anti-patterns you list are probably only
under your VP. If anything I think the company is taking action to trim
bloated orgs. For example there are internal efforts to prune middle
management issues.

(For those that don’t know, Amazon has only one middle manager level (L7); L6
is a frontline manager and L8 is a director. The anti-pattern is when you have
L6 reporting to L6, L7 reporting to L7, L8 reporting to L8, L10 reporting to
L10...)

~~~
throwawayamzn52
Having been within three separate orgs within AMZN within the last three
years, it's hard to believe this is a problem specific to individual orgs. Too
much growth too fast.

~~~
perseusprime11
Don't you read Bezos's letters? It is still Day 1...

------
srge
As a CEO of a startup (10 employees, bootstraped) this post was very
inspiring. I am spending my time improving my machine and growing it. But I
spend no time at all building the blueprint from which the machine could build
itself.

Sometime words, or expressions in this case (« the machine that builds the
machine ») can reveal or even create a new reality. That’s what I feel right
now.

------
AJRF
It’s hard to take anything Ben says seriously anymore. He uses his platform to
shill Apple and trash Tesla all the time. This time it only took one sentence
before he got cracking on it. Seriously look at his Twitter and its the same
monotonous praise for Apple and trashing Tesla Ad nauseam

~~~
melling
“but Tesla has yet to build a machine that can manufacture Model 3s
efficiently, reliable, quickly and at quality at the scale of the incumbent
car industry. ”

People love to call out the Model 3, but Tesla makes almost 2,000 cars a week.
They obviously are having a problem with the battery for it. As a general
problem, they are past making a few hundred cars a quarter.

~~~
carlmr
>People love to call out the Model 3, but Tesla makes almost 2,000 cars a
week. They obviously are having a problem with the battery for it. As a
general problem, they are past making a few hundred cars a quarter.

They always overpromised by a few months. It's been a pattern since the start.
Apart from the delay they have delivered on their promises after a while.

I mean you can think of their estimations what you want. It could be a bit too
much optimism (although can there be too much optimism for a startup?), it
could be a marketing tactic. But they've consistently beaten the skeptics
until now.

~~~
ajford
> They always overpromised by a few months. It's been a pattern since the
> start.

I think this is an endemic problem with Elon Musk himself. He's always very
optimistic about all his ventures (Tesla, SpaceX, SpaceX's Texas launch
facility, Hyperloop...). He seems to have issues with estimating real-world
issues that creep into every project.

However, like you said, he does always seem to get there in the end, one way
or another.

~~~
maherbeg
I like to say Elon over promises and eventually delivers.

------
andygcook
This rings very similar to the Startup Way, Eric Ries’s new book about how
larger organizations need to functionalize entrepreneurship and the successor
to the Lean Startup. I’m reading it right now and having started an internal
startup at a public software company years ago, it’s really quite good. My
guess is Ben is reading it right now based on some of the verbiage like
“atomized teams” that Eric uses repeatedly in the book.

~~~
j_s
[https://amzn.com/B01MYG4MNA](https://amzn.com/B01MYG4MNA)

~~~
salemh
Please don't use shortener URLs.

Expanded:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYG4MNA/ref=cm_sw_su_dp](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYG4MNA/ref=cm_sw_su_dp)

~~~
j_s
There is nearly a decade of precedent for complaint-free use of the amzn.com
domain here on HN[0].

The amzn.com link I provided is as much an Amazon link as your expanded
version (both domains are owned by Amazon[1]).

I choose not to use the official, shortest a.co option (growing in popularity
here[2][3]) because it obscures a tiny bit more context (the Amazon Standard
Identification Number is usually recognizable as such).

[0]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amzn.com&type=comment&sort=byD...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amzn.com&type=comment&sort=byDate&page=22)

[1] [http://blog.go2.me/2009/04/amazon-has-integrated-url-
shorten...](http://blog.go2.me/2009/04/amazon-has-integrated-url-
shortener.html)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14162832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14162832)

[3]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=:%2F%2Fa.co%2F&type=comment&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=:%2F%2Fa.co%2F&type=comment&sort=byDate)

------
grapeshot
This works for AMZN as long as customers don't get fed up with the results of
this lack of attention to category detail:

\- reviews for different items aggregated together making them useless

\- counterfeits commingled with legitimate items with the same UPC

\- questionable packaging decisions

\- delivery drivers without consistent routes so they never learn how to find
your address / get into your building

------
nerdsaresingle
Good read. Same goes with google. Google has self replicating talent machine
built up which builds the talent machine recursively.

------
Nomentatus
"If the machine is designed to do X, it will struggle at Y no matter how
clever the people."

Not quite true as stated - unless this means that excellent people doing
excellent work on unfavored Y are overwhelmingly likely to be transferred to a
team working on X.

Many successful pivots were possible because the team assigned to do Y were
unexpected stars and before they could be shifted to more central work, it
became clear they had created a different and more viable business than the
machine they were supposed to be a minor part of.

------
amelius
Isn't it obvious that once you have a big selling platform, you can make it
grow until you hit a competitor that is bigger than you? Which in the case of
Amazon is not happening.

Can we please turn "selling" into a utility function, so that the "digital
economy" can perhaps turn into something useful instead of a detriment?

~~~
TulliusCicero
> Isn't it obvious that once you have a big selling platform, you can make it
> grow until you hit a competitor that is bigger than you?

How'd that work out for eBay?

What is it with so many human beings where -- even in a clearly competitive
environment -- we assume difficult things are dead simple and easy? History is
_rife_ with incumbents that failed on their own or were defeated by upstarts,
you have to really go out of your way to pretend those don't exist or convince
yourself that they were all full of the unusually stupid, and yet some people
make it work.

~~~
amelius
> History is rife with incumbents that failed on their own or were defeated by
> upstarts (...)

Yes, this may happen if the upstarts manage to grab the sales channel
(portal). But this is not likely to happen with Amazon.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> But this is not likely to happen with Amazon.

Agreed. But "unlikely to happen to [specific company]" is a wildly different
assertion than "Isn't it obvious that once you have a big selling platform,
you can make it grow until you hit a competitor that is bigger than you?"

The implication of the latter statement is that once you're ahead, you're
destined to stay ahead unless you hit upon a competitor that's already bigger.
Obviously, that hasn't been true in the real world.

~~~
amelius
You could read it in a probabilistic sense. The bigger you are, the less
likely that some other company will swoop you away. But it can happen, yes.

