As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.
AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.
Yes, this has always been the major advantage of online shopping for me, since its very appearance.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.
for a few years I was an HP Server Automation SME.
I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).
every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.
the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.
Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.
Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.
I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.
Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.
We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.
Consider this difference between today and the dotcom boom:
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.
There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
No. Not at all. This type of reaction to a new technology is probably different from all the previous ones. There wasn’t talk of a “permanent underclass” for other revolutions. But with AI, we will probably see a lot of labor just become unnecessary in many parts of society, not just one industry.
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
Free Prime shipping which started in 2005 was the real killer. Before that it was more about the large variety that was simply not available in bookstores etc. so people were willing to pay extra for shipping.
What's amazing to me is that even with prime free shipping in the US. NOTHING has ever beaten USPS for small shipping.
And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.
Example.
The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.
Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.
During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
> What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
Wouldn't you get >50% of the usefulness and 0% of the risk if you add read+draft permissions for the email connection through a proxy or oauth permissions? Then your claw can draft replies and you have to manually review+send. It's not a perfect PA that way, but could still be better than doing everything yourself for the vast majority of people who don't have a PA anyway?
It feels like, just like SWEs do with AI, we should treat the claw as an enthusiastic junior: let it do stuff, but always review before you merge (or in this case: send).
For me it's a bit of both. I'm working on exciting energy software with people who have deep knowledge of the sector but only semi-decent software knowledge. Nearly every day I'm reviewing some shitty PR comprised of awful, ugly code that somehow mostly works.
The product itself is exciting and solves a very real problem, and we have many customers who want to use it and pay for it. But damn, it hurts my soul knowing what goes on under the hood.
I should have read this 12h ago! This afternoon, I tried to create my first simple agent using LangChain. My aim was to repeatedly run a specific python analysis function and perform a binary search to find the optimal result, then compile the results into a markdown report and export it as a PDF.
However, I now realize that most of these steps don't require AI at all, let alone agents. I wrote the full algorithm (including the binary search!) in natural language for the LLM. And although it sometimes worked, the model often misunderstood and produced random errors out of the blue.
I now realize that this is not what agents are for. This problem didn't require any agentic behavior. It was just a fixed workflow, with one single AI step (generating a markdown report text).
Oh well, nothing wrong with learning the hard way.
You call it silly because you could be doing useful stuff on your phone. I'd go one step further and say that even if you're slacking off that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody, including politicians, slacks off from time to time. Be it due to stress, awful sleep because the neighbor's dog barked all night, illness, or something else. It's just human and there's little wrong with it as long as you do your job well most of the time.
Which has me wondering if the entire point is to make the politicians critically aware of how absurd AI performance monitoring isn't as innocuous as those selling it to the politicians will make it out to be.
I obviously don't want politicians to be habitually slacking off, but everyone has good days and bad days. There are days where I spend half my time on HN instead of working (hello today), but I typically make up for it shortly afterwards by having a super productive day. The important fact is that, on average, I'm productive and deliver on my job duties.
Politicians should absolutely be held accountable, it's an important job, but I don't think they should be held to standards that we hold no one else to.
> Bezos nailed it on this topic: “[...] [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things [...] will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. [...]”
> You should consider what won’t change, and the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I think won’t change: I believe AI is and will continue to gain intelligence
Okay, but that way you can frame every ongoing change as a constant. "Change X will continue, and because it's already ongoing and will simply continue, I consider it a constant and therefore add it to my list of 'things that won't change'". But that's clearly not what Bezos meant.
I think it's pretty easy to see the statement is an oversimplification to the point where it loses pretty much loses all value. Bezos says customers want vast selection, but most would agree that the reason Amazon is garbage these days is because it's flooded with cheap crap. The selection is vast, but the pile of dung is so large that it's practically impossible to find a good product hidden underneath the rest of it.
I find Bezos' statement to be a bit oversimplified. For example Temu (and virtually every other Chinese E commerce) wipes the floor with price and selection. Costco is cheaper than Walmart. Yet Amazon is vastly larger than both.
Agreed. Without negative caveats, such positive statements are meaningless.
Customers want cheap goods.
Caveat: They don't want (to know that) those goods are produced by slave labour.
Customers want a vast selection.
Caveat: This should not include fake, shoddy or misleading listings
Customers want rapid delivery.
Caveat: And they want it cheaply, or ideally for free, without breaking their stuff, at times they are home or in a manner they can receive the goods while away from home.
Sorry this is a bit off topic (but relevant to your post).
I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?
I have experience with the German Amazon, and often they're not the cheapest, they often don't have stock of the most popular items (as in the stuff you'd actually want, like iPhones or NVIDIA GPUs), and same day delivery, while nice, is something I can usually live without (and I'm willing to trade it in exchange for lower prices).
They seem to have an endless back catalog of cheap and cheerful mystery products of dubious quality, but I hardly consider that a decisive competitive edge.
Amazon is excellent at selling physical books. I can order pretty much any vaguely popular book and have it delivered the next day at a price rarely higher than anywhere else.
That’s Amazon’s core business philosophically, everything else is an add on or side project that happened to be profitable.
I think that just like the original sin of web development is trying to run apps in a document browser, the original sin of Amazon is trying to sell everything in a bookstore.
> I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?
I'm not American either, but I use Amazon.fr occasionally. It has going for it:
* it's a trustworthy site. If I order something, I'm 100% sure I'll get it or get my money back. If I'm looking for something rather niche like an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, it beats buying on it vs a random site I've never heard of before that it will have longer delivery times and might be a scam or might have nonexistant support
* it has a large catalogue. I can buy coffee, kimchi, small electronics (PWM servo motors), larger electronics (toaster), power bank, USB C charger, mouse, outdoor furniture. It's easy to buy all sorts of stuff off it without hunting specialised physical stores or a ton of different websites. (of course for some things I know and already trust various websites or stores, so I buy off them; but for more generic or niche things, Amazon is pretty good)
* support, returns, delivery are all very good and there is barely anyone that is even close.
US Amazon isn't like that, but iphones and short supply GPUs aren't widely available anyway. Apple controls where you can buy an iPhone and NVidia controls who gets GPUs.
Yes, definately. I find the lack of discussion about time frames as totally unserious. Their starting assumptions could be all valid if clairvoyantly made in the 90s and they'd still be utterly useless in helping startups make decisions for that decade. However, if they knew there would be significant breakthroughs in the early 2020s, well that'd be something else. Though you know, they'd have to find some random ways to stay alive until then.
Bezos is making assumptions about human behavior in that quote, and those assumptions seem instantly obvious to any human who is asked, regardless of their experience or expertise with any business whatsoever. There is no instant validity possible with the AI assumption.
> You should consider what won’t change, and the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I think won’t change: I believe AI is and will continue to gain intelligence
I think this is a miss-representation of what he meant. Given that AI will be capable and prevalent (cheap intelligence) what are the factors that remain constant? He goes a lot into demand for physical things, like resources and/or supply chain, which is true. If anyone can relatively easily create a digital service then those with capital and physical resources will have bigger moat.
I personally think what will happen with the demand for digital services with intelligence being cheap.
100%. This sentence in particular seems at odd with looking at constants:
> “Better product”: We need to define "better" clearly, but if you're basing this off your R&D efforts, I would very much fear the competition coming my way. If someone can use enough compute to copy you and use AGI to make a product better than what you currently have, is it still "better"?
IMO, better products is actually a constant that is anti-fragile to AI. Better products remain the best way to gain market shares for the foreseeable future (alongside solid marketing, ops and finance).
(total side track) There are other things that some customers want though:
- for the recommendations to offer me things I want or need, not things I just bought
- to be able to evaluate the quality of items rather than just the price of items
- for Amazon to extend it's brand around the items that I buy. "Amazon Recommends" is just so weak and offers no assurance or opportunity for loyalty. It's more or less meaningless and I suspect it's something that suppliers buy.
As every in business it's very difficult. I know that Amazon is humongous and knows it's business inside out. I am sure that Amazon insiders just feel tired reading other people's ideas about what would make things better, but on the other hand I do think that the narratives of business inevitability (and AI inevitability) are just false. Yes they have triumphed until recently, but what's happening in China really does undermine the idea that the future will be everyone just grifting to everyone else for a dime while the big corps enshitify anything that emerges from the primordial ooze.
Not that I think that what's happening in China is good.
> Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem.
Heck, even Ikea has successfully been selling ice cream (from self serve machines!) here in the Netherlands for like 20 years now. €0.50 back in the day, €1 now. Can't remember the last time all machines (yes, they do have at least 2 usually) required maintenance.
1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.
2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.
And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.
Core platform services include "online intermediation services" and "video sharing platform services" both of which Netflix could be argued to count as. But I guess there are probably fewer than 10,000 EU businesses distributing content through Netflix?
I was under the impression that Netflix was not deemed video sharing platform because they don't actively dictate what is and is not allowed on the platform the way YouTube does. But maybe it was the 10,000 rule, who knows. To my knowledge the EU never made explicit why companies were not deemed gatekeeper.
At some point, labelling gatekeepers comes down to how many "gatekeepers" are there resources to go after.
Naming all potential gatekeepers would only set the EU up to look capricious when it still only had enough resources to go after its highest priority targets.
So there will never be an obvious rational line of who is in or out. Just the sued and unsued.
