Amazon.Heartbreak 455
Mike Daisey's Amazon wasn't really a good place to work in. He had doubts when the interviewer asked him for his college board scores and GPA (the company made a big point of seeking out highly-educated freaks and geeks), and when he noticed all the desks were fashioned out of used doors.
The company, he soon found out, was a bizarre corporate/yuppie/geek shell-game, equal parts myth, BS, and Yes, some idealism and innovation. Remember those lonely pundits, analysts and prophets wandering the talk shows, wondering aloud whether it was really okay for a company that hadn't ever turned a dime's profit to be valued so highly by stockholders and so loved by media? They were quickly shouted down or ignored by the geek digerati and bewildered journalists and analysts, dismissed as clueless old farts and reactionaries. We wanted so much to believe that people like Bezos and companies like Amazon were re-shaping the world (I sure thought the Net would revolutionize politics and business, though I never could see how Amazon would make money with those discounts and shipping costs.) We have yet to fully acknowledge that if it survives at all, Amazon will make it as any other company has, not as part of any revolution.
Daisey, who writes in an original, bitingly funny voice, nearly went mad at Amazon and long ago fled Starbucks-land for Brooklyn (the surprising new universal destination point for hip and creative seekers of fortune), where he has prospered, adapting his book into a successful off-Broadway play. On one level, his story is a pure riot, especially his accounts of life as a customer service phone rep and of the hero-worship of "Jeff" throughout the company. Daisey escaped from customer service to become a toy evaluator (the description of an Amazon employee storming his Seattle apartment to try to get back the toys he was late reviewing for the site is a classic) and then into corporate HQ, the gothic mansion housing avocado sandwiches, slaves to fetch laundry, Jeff and Business Development. His anecdotal profiles of geeks who were not nearly as smart as they thought they were, and of Seattle, for a couple of years the smug, red-hot center of the new-kind-of-company-that-was-reshaping the world are also piercing and well written. He describes Amazon's headquarters as "Lex Luthor's Freak House on the Hill ... it squats like an art deco toad over the city of Seattle, its insides all scooped out and replaced with IKEA and geek central -- a trifecta of Batcave, Fortress of Solitude, and supervillain lair."
But Amazon, Daisey suggests, was mostly a weird idea hovering in the brains of Bezos and his many camp followers in media and business. Well, it was more than an idea.
But however bad you thought companies like Amazon might be, it was worse. Banks of bored, gerbil-like customer service phone reps alternately took orders (at the time, nobody trusted sending their credit card numbers over the Net, although they rarely hesitated to turn them over to teenaged cashiers in restaurants) and soothed legions of enraged customers. They pretended to be managers when customers demanded to talk to one, pretended to be sorry for their troubles, pretended to get their problems sorted out right away.
The American consumer, Daisey perceptively points out, is a creature of entitlement, expecting instant satisfaction from somebody whenever something goes wrong, even though (in the tech world at least) they rarely get any. CS and tech support reps are the sacrificial lambs placed between furious buyers, bad service, poor products and craven corporate execs. At Amazon, software-wielding managers counted the time the reps spent on the phone, the length of calls (there was great pressure to resolve problems in seconds, not minutes), the number of customers they were "handling," the number of problems "resolved."
For all the monitoring, though, reps like Daisey were curiously unaccountable. They hated their work, and were numbed by it. Customers took their chances.
Daisey and other CS reps, pretending to be courteous to hordes, faked efficiency by dialing themselves and then hanging up, raising their efficiency numbers to the point where many got promoted. During Amazon's frequent early server crashes, Daisey and his fellow workers would take credit card orders and numbers down by hand, with many of the slips then lying around in piles for days or inadvertently brought home. All Amazon employees dreaded Christmas, when the overextended company struggled to deal with demand it simply wasn't equipped to meet. (It was during Christmas shopping periods that the cracks in Bezos's public relations blitz began to show.)
And on top of all of their humiliations and degradations, Daisey and many of his colleagues showed up at work one day to learn that many of the CS jobs had vanished from Seattle, farmed out to India where phone workers earning $1 an hour assured frustrated customers their books were on the way.
In between the descriptions of insanity inside Amazon, Daisey portrays a picture of a company whose ambition from the first outstripped its resources. Wall Street was traumatized by the prospect of e-commerce, and Bezos seemed to them to grasp what the new world order would be like. So Bezos, like Gates, became one of the Net's mini-Gods. As soon as it became common knowledge that Amazon had whipped bn.com, the next logical step was that Amazon would have to take on the mothership -- Barnes & Noble itself. "If Amazon was going to justify a market cap larger than most third world countries," writes Daisey,"it was going to have to trounce Barnes & Noble and all the other physical booksellers," since books, after all, were Amazon's core product.
That, of course, never happened. Instead, Bezos panicked and swerved. "Reporters would ask about the rivalry, the dueling press releases and other PR efforts of the past, and Jeff would shrug and smile his smile. He talked about entering new markets, how Amazon was so much more than a bookseller that it seemed book sales hardly mattered. It was as though he could hold up a hand puppet and tell the press, 'Look at the puppet ... don't look over there, look at this shiny puppet,' and the press watched the puppet, wondering how on earth he made that little guy talk. You wouldn't even know that Amazon sold books anymore from some of the stories coming out, much less that they were the vast majority of its sales."
Bezos, Daisey theorizes, knew Amazon would never be able to compete with Barnes & Noble in the non-virtual realm, and the company soon lost identity, focus, even the confidence of gullible journalists and analysts. Employees knew all along what those crank analysts had been saying -- because of shipping costs, the company had to discount its products too heavily to be competitive. This was a dilemma the new economy thinkers and gurus at Amazon have never solved.
In the meantime, Daisey had hilarious confrontations with geek, yuppie and hippie bosses, all of whom he outmaneuvered or outsmarted; helped himself to a generous supply of Post-its and company pens; and referred to his fellow employees and friends by their Amazon e-mail names -- "bsmith," "hjones" and so on-- as was Amazon tradition.
But he never really knew what any of his jobs required of him, nor did he ever witness anything at Amazon working rationally or well. Employees were obsessed with their stock holdings and with Amazon's almost desperate efforts to expand into new realms to justify the fanatic faith of early Net-believers.
Daisey's book underscores something that ought to have been apparent for some time: Net companies are often corporate cults -- Gates, Jobs, Yang, Bezos -- revolving around eccentric, self-styled geeky gurus who profess to be changing the world and who have a genius for convincing the always-gullible media that they are. For all their arrogance and savvy, geeks and nerds seem to crave leaders to follow. At least Gates rewarded his with lots of successful stock.
At Amazon, employees sat around their desks e-mailing one another about Jeff:
- He was worth billions but rented an apartment and drove a Toyota hatchback (true.)
- He worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com (true).
- He slept only three hours a night (false).
- He still responded to e-mail at his public address, jeff@amazon.com (true.)
The problem with cults, of course, is that they foster disconnection with the real world. Amazon lost touch with the rest of the planet as its hapless employees, many doomed to be laid off, obsessed over their stock value and counting the days to becoming millionaires. When the followers discover their gurus are all too human, bitterness and disenchantment seem inevitable.
What makes this an especially significant book is that Daisey has written a story about a generation and its values; as well as a riveting business yarn. The kids working 90 hours a week at Amazon, and the execs and white-collar workers sleeping on motel-room floors and hauling boxes in warehouses during the holidays, (Amazon built giant warehouses in remote places where there were no available workers to hire) thought they were re-inventing the world. Instead, they were simply pawns in one man's high-stakes gamble. Suspicious of authority and corporate values, they succumbed anyway -- mostly because of the aura of hipness and the promise of wealth -- to both, though in new guises. Geeks, it turns out, are as greedy as anybody. Daisey discovered, as so many of his generation were about to -- that Bezos and the other cult leaders had simply dressed up the hog.
Yet Daisey, along with his increasingly bewildered co-workers, really wanted to believe. At first, he felt he had finally kind a new kind of work culture, one he could spend the rest of his life working in and for. In a way, he was heartbroken when the truth finally dawned, and his account is touching as well as comic. Anybody who experienced the Net in its early days, or is struggling to deal with new notions of truth, economics and work in the digital age, will understand.
Looking for a copy (Score:4, Funny)
irony... (Score:5, Funny)
if you can't load the link... (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, you can just go to the actual page [barnesandnoble.com] instead of going through the advertisement provider.
Amazon.Heartbreak? (Score:2)
BN vs Amazon (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BN vs Amazon (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, but Amazon will lose your order.
You can... (Score:2, Redundant)
:)
would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Insightful)
Would it have been so hard to sacrifice making money to make something "cool" for a smaller market? LMAO!
However ludicrous (sp?) that statement may be, I still disagree with many of Amazon's practices. Yet, I still think that building a business might be based more on capitalism than "coolism"
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:4, Insightful)
When Adam Smith wrote about capitalism, he suggested it'd be a good way to get stuff made, to help people, to give people a way to live off what they did well. Large corperations employing Bachelor of Arts grads at callcenters doth not good jobs (or good pay, benifits, security) make. It doesn't sound to me like Adam Smith was saying, "Hey, lets try this out, and we can make a bunch of investors rich using an army of minimum wage earning grads!"
> corporations exist in order to make money and as much money as possible
Thats why you think corperations exist. Can you tell me what the point of 'making as much money as possible' is? Why that, it and of itself, is a good thing if they are making that money by placing poor work conditions on its employees? Sorry, I'm trying to figure out what end is justifying the means here
You should be aware that 75% of all jobs in the states are service/retail based. Thats the success of that free-market capitalism. Everything is made in the cheap countries, and Americans are enslaved in min wage jobs to sell it to other Americans enslaved in management jobs. Arn't you the least bit worried that one day everyone will wake up and realize not only do they not do anything particularly useful or enjoyable anymore, but the interesting and ultimately neccessary jobs dont even exist in their country?
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:4, Funny)
This "money" you speak of is interesting: it is a representation of the value of goods and services. "Making as much money as possible" is shorthand for "creating as much productivity as possible and being rewarded for doing so."
Or, if you would prefer a Simpsons quote:
Homer: "Twenty dollars? Aww, I wanted a peanut!"
Brain: "$20 can buy many peanuts."
Homer: "Explain how!"
Brain: "Money can be exchanged for goods and services."
Homer: "Whoo-hoo!"
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Interesting)
In response to your referencing of Adam Smith, I'd say this to you: The view of capitalism that Adam Smith had is not the one that currently exists in America. I was neither endorsing nor attacking this system - merely pointing out that Daisey should have been aware of the way things are (as you seem to be with the obvious conclusion you're making that a small class of people is exploiting the majority) and not been so surprised or sickened by it. As for your questioning of me as to what the point of making as much money as possible is, I cannot tell you. I didn't claim that this was my view. Again, you have to read what I wrote a bit more carefully. In America, this is what corporations do. They are not very concerned with social progress or development but instead are only focused on the bottom line. It seems to me like you're trying to make an argument against an argument I did not make. Nowhere in my statement did I say that the way corporations operate is right or morally justified but instead was merely pointing out that Daisey should have understood what corporations are and not expected anything but what he got. I hope this clears things up for you as you seem to have missed my main point.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
I certainly understand your point, but I can only reply that nothing gets done unless people are disgusted by the present (for which, presumably, nobody should ever be surprised by), even if they understood what they were getting into.
Your point is well received, but I still think he's got the right idea by trying to point out the lunacy in all of it. You might know its that way, but tons and tons of people (though probably not at
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Insightful)
What system that helps humans do you propose we use? What are we getting into? Your posts seem to be alluding to some secret that everyone knows about the evil of capitalism, but you never state it or how we can fix it. What's going on here?
-Confused
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Read "No Logo". Search for it at Amazon. Read it with an open mind, and you'll begin to see what I mean. Try out a few books on the left of center regarding the left's view of global trade over the last 30 years.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Informative)
Managerial and professional 40,887 (thousand)
Tech, Sales and Admin Support 39442
Service 18278
Precision Production, Craft and Repair 14882
Operators, Fabricators and Laborers 18319
Farming, Forestry, Fishing 3399
I doubt it has changed all that much, read the report for more details.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Please dont tell me you're including the majority of management jobs in that count. 'Professionals' would probably be including McDonalds, Starbucks, etc location managers. Does that count as mindfull, fulfulling work?
My stat was based on the sector you worked in, not neccessarily what you did. So, if you were a manager at Starbucks, you're in retail. I havn't met many retail managers that enjoyed their work or used their skills (with the exception of punctuality and an illusion that you'll move onto a good job any day now) to any meaningful degree.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2, Insightful)
So what exactly is your alternative? Perhaps more Americans should be enslaved on the assembly line? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most people would rather sell shoes than make (as in stitch, not design) them. Or do you have some utopian view where it's possible to employ everyone in high-level, stimulating jobs while the robots clean out the public toilets?
As to the reason I think companies exist, I think the answer is to please their founder (or at least current owner(s)). The fact that the biggest, most talked about companies appear to be in the business of making money for their shareholders is hardly surprising -- they're doing exactly what their owners want them to (or _not_ doing it..).
Also, I believe they prefer to be called "inexpensive countries" rather than "cheap" ones.
I'm sorry, I thought this is why so many people came to the US every year. Or maybe that's just because the US actually has jobs... At any rate, people have been less than enjoyable work for many thousands of years now. They're really quite good at it when it gives them some money for food and stuff.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:3, Informative)
You should consider getting a copy of the Statistical Abstract or just browsing online [census.gov]. Everything in this paragraph is wrong. For example, on 3.7% of workers earn minimum wage or less (Table 625). "Services" includes retail, but also doctors and lawyers and teachers. By itself, retail only accounts for 17% of the workforce. (Table 596).
Although the percent of the workforce in manufacturing has been declining, it is not because we don't make anything anymore; actual manufacturing output increases every decade. For example, manufacturing output increased 38% from 1990 to 1999 (Table 971). By dollar value, over 80% of manufactured goods sold in the U.S. are made in the U.S.
Also, most goods that we import are not made in "cheap countries." We import more from high-wage countries than from low-wage countries. The top ten countries we import from are, in order, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Korea, France, and Malaysia. The high-wage five of these account for 42% of all imports. The low-wage five account for just 28%. See Table 1302 to see where the other 30% of goods come from. You may be surprised. (Here I'm counting Korea and Taiwan as low wage, but really, they make pretty good money. Korean per capita income (purchasing power parity) is almost exactly half of the U.S.).
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Exactly! Nice to meet someone who can actually wake up and smell the foreign contractors.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can do all the things you mentionned by going to my neighbourhood suppliers. I dont have to do it myself, because there are some companies around here that make a profit without trying to be huge as fuck. Unfortunately, since Americans are subject to the highest production-value brainwashing outfit of all time (called "Corperate Advertising and Why We Rock - Admit It, You Cant Imagine the World Any Other Way"), this concept either mystifies or disgusts people like you.
Companies must turn a profit. Companies do not have to be 'the biggest company' to do so. That is the concept you should nail through your moronic head. The capitalist world existed quite nicely before the "Be The Biggest or Go Home" mentality that old stupid already-rich-but-need-an-excuse-to-be-richer white men that fooled you into believing over the last 20-odd years.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
You know, I think you're right. All this huge-corporation stuff is really stifling the quality of living in America. It's really awful here. If only we could turn back the clock to the nineteenth century!
You really need to get a grip on yourself -- you're not nearly infallible enough that the only reason people disagree with you is that they've been brainwashed.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
No, the quality of living is getting better. It's the happiness of living and the quality of living gap that is getting worse. But alas, I can see I'll get nowhere with you.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Like another poster down below this said, you seem to be operating on some vague set of assumptions about the evils of "big corporations," without making any sort of claim as to what they are, much less how they could be different. All we have to go on is "they make people unhappy," which is the sort of reasoning that makes me glad more pragmatic people are actually in charge of the country.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:4, Interesting)
- Squeeze out compition on the basis of reach and advertising dollar, not quality of product or service.
- Reduce fulltime jobs, job security, benifits. Microsoft, for instance, is notorious for pioneering the use of skilled temps, to make them more 'flexible' - at the cost of converting tons of jobs into insecure temp jobs with no benifits. Since they are a major employer of tech workers in the US, they have leverage to 'force' labour trends that profit them but reduce the workers payment for their work.
- Subcontract manufacturing to forgeign lands with little or no labour law enforcement, thus not only screwing people in foreign countries with the enormous purchasing power of US multinationals, but moving good manufacturing jobs (which pay consierably more than service/retail jobs, with benifits, unions (I know thats a dirty word in the US)) to foriegn countries
- Lobby government to enact laws that the
- Force foreign governments to change safety and envrionmental laws to uphold their 'right to profit' as set out in international trade agreements championed by said corperations.
- Cause enormous environmental damage (but ignore this if it turns me into a hippy in your mind)
- Treat you like a number (which seems to be a bad thing in commercials, but people dont seem to have a problem with it in real life for some reason)
- Subvert culture. Case in point is that most american culture is now 'branded'
Should I go on?
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean on the basis of consumer choice. More people go to McDonald's than to the local Italian restaurant because that's what people want. They decide based on price, convenience, and quality. You're just assuming that if only everyone could be as sophisticated as you, they would choose better.
And again, you ascribe no value to the choice of workers in the system. Those jobs move overseas because there are people there willing to work for lower wages for them, and the people in US would rather work these horrible, awful, demeaning service/retail jobs. You must be the only person I've met who thinks coal mines, steel mills, and assembly lines are desirable jobs.
Another note -- you are aware that retail and service jobs have unions, too, aren't you? Maybe you've heard of SEIU [seiu.org]? Know why service unions aren't as popular as manufacturing unions? Because service employees have better hours, wages, benefits, etc. than manufacturing employees.
Yes, once again, if only the proles understood what was being done to them! They'd be horrified at their meaningless existences!
Well, that's sufficiently vague to deflect any real criticism, so I'll just note that reducing the ratio of service/retail workers would just make this worse -- fewer people to talk to when dealing with huge evil corporations.
I'm real sorry that your sense of aesthetics has been injured by advertising, but if everyone felt the same way, they would stop watching, reading, or listening to this culture. Again, your hatred for the unwashed masses, hidden behind a conceit of patronizing concern, shines through.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
In a country where more people are now dying from being fat rather than smoking, you're telling me that these people _want_ McDonalds? What about smoking laws? Should we give 15 year olds the cigarettes they want? The big macs?
How about laziness? Laziness rather than want? Does the concept of exploitation mean ANYTHING to americans?
> Again, your hatred for the unwashed masses, hidden behind a conceit of patronizing concern, shines through.
Damn man, after your well though out points, I was expecting something a little more on the mark. How about the fact that I am a little more left than right?
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
When people like you get it through your thick skull that culture is required (people will and cannot go without it), and admit that avoiding corpertized culture is next to impossible unless to put some serious serious effort into it, people dont have a choice.
This is what you seem unable to grasp. People do not 'choose', they do what their social flock does (context over choice, read "The Tipping Point" or any other psychology book dealing with the propogation of social ideas and behaviour.) It's not condecending, I'm in this boat too. There is less of a choice in 'opting out' of corperate culture than there ever has been before.
People did try, to some extent, to avoid all that advertising, but they tend to get bought out or shut down by companies when they attempt to relate to the rest of the world (since the culture that binds most people, again, is protected by armies or lawyers who ensure communication and cultural messages are only passed from master to servent, and never between servents
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the fact that so many people are obese kind of proves that McDonald's is what people want, doesn't it? And I don't think I need to expound on the difference between allowing adults to make all of their own decisions and allowing minors the same.
You say laziness, I say convenience. I'm not sure what you mean about the "exploitation" thing, unless you mean that McDonald's is exploiting the population by putting restaurants in fiendishly convenient locations.
That was the whole point of my post. Voting for Nader does not mean that you "care for the little people." In fact, it means that you don't trust them to make their own decisions, ascribe "wrong" decisions to brainwashing by advertising, and desire to have a parental government put in place that can make their decisions for them.
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine? (Score:2)
I really think its funny how often people try to defend their viewpoints dealing with huge complex macrocosmic systems using their individual experiences.
And dont say, "What else am I supposed to use." Thats what books, objectivity, reasoning and problem solving skills were designed for, although I understand that those were all exported out of the US to China recently, designated as 'toxic waste'.
Re:Capitalism/ the "market" applies to employees a (Score:2)
Yeah. We all know morality belongs safely locked up in the sitcoms, movies and books we watch! It has no place in the real world! Thats why we all say morality is a good thing in hallmark cards
My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:4, Insightful)
"What's a sell-out?"
"If you make money...then you're a sellout."
There's not one of you out there who wouldn't trade your 9-5 tech day job for the chance to manage Amazon.com and make millions each year. But, because they're making money and aren't the cool, hip, "underground" thing anymore, you hate them.
Whatever. My UHF DVD is on its way from Amazon, and I couldn't be happier.
Re:My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, there are. Me. But you'll just say, "I'm lying." or "Thats cause youre not smart enough to make money" or some other idiotic rheotoric that people who feel all people are driven by money and power seem so glib to use.
Re:My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see what the difference is between a "megamall" and a coo', quirky bookstore ONLINE.
It's a freakin website first of all, second of all, they sell everything and have good prices and a lot of cool features that making shopping easy.
What makes a cool quirky website? green background? purple flowers? Hemp baskets for sale?
I'd drop my job to own Amazon. Thanks for the reality comment.
Re:My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:2)
Let me teach you something about life:
1) you dont have to see it or count it to know its there
2) "megamall" amazon clearly fostered alot of shitty ass jobs. small companies generally dont suffer from this problem, as they generally have smaller, more personable staff, where employees are more free to suit their job to their interests. better jobs = happier people = you probably wouldn't wanna own amazon if you truely loved your job
3) "megamall" amazon can bankrupt the publishing industry with a few massive orders. "quirky" smaller companies do not brandish the power to disrupt cashflows inside an entire industry.
It's about size and power, friend. If you're huge, you can fuck shit up bad. If you're smaller and quirky, you're probably more fun to work at, and less likely to drown others in what should be your own waves.
Re:My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:2)
Think of walmat. They represent 15% of ALL MUSIC RETAIL sales in the US. When some artist has to change the cover of their CD so its more 'politically correct', thats Walmat trying to preserve its family image (It was Walmat that got the Nivana In Utero CD Cover changed.)
Small comapanies dont have the power to drown other markets, industries, companies in the wake of their own mistakes. The Amazons, Walmarts, do.
I'm not talking about the company fucking up itself. I'm talking about how mistakes made by huge companies can torpedo other markets and indistries through no fault of their own. Small companies dont have the power to do so. There are more cheques and balances in a system with smaller competiting entities.
Re:My favorite South Park quotes.... (Score:2)
Just because i'd like to manage a company with over a billion dollars in losses and a measely 5 million in profit doesn't validate the company in any way. It just means i like easy money as much as the next guy.
Don't go there (Score:3, Informative)
I stay away from amazon. Ever hear of www.epic.org? They are a privacy watchdog, and I have stayed away from amazon ever since they said
Recently Amazon announced that it could no longer guarantee that it would not disclose customer information to third parties.
You can read the whole press release here [epic.org]
Re:Don't go there (Score:2)
Your antennae is off! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Don't go there (Score:2, Informative)
For EPIC to say they were fine with the original policy, which effectively guaranteed nothing, but not with the revised policy, which put specific conditions on the release of customer info, seems very strange to me. If they are truly concerned about privacy, they should have objected equally to both policies.
Re:Don't go there (Score:4, Funny)
Well, if you ordered from them once, they already have your personal info, so you might as well get some cheaper books before the spam starts...
Re:Don't go there (Score:2)
I too am paranoid. When I order things online and am required to give out my email address, I always create an address for that specific purpose (the joys of having your own domain). I've been a pretty consistant customer of Amazon's since 1998 and I have never received a piece of non-Amazon spam to that address (I do receive a lot of stuff from Amazon touting some product they think I might want to buy...I'm not sure what's worse, the SPAM or the fact that their usually right). In contrast, the majority of email addresses that I give out to other companies end up flooded with spam within a few months.
So, the dilemma is basically whether to trust your information to a company that is forthright enough to say that they have every right to share it in the future or whether to trust it to a company that will pay lip service to privacy until they need to sell your information. If you've read through most online privacy policies (I actually read most of them...I'm a bit perverse that way
So, in reality, Amazon is no less safe a place for your personal information. It's actually probably a safer place due to the fact that it probably won't go out of business anytime soon and it's security is far better than most online retailers.
I saw this show... (Score:4, Informative)
videos for download (Score:5, Informative)
Re:videos for download (Score:2)
Re:videos for download (Score:2)
I was thinking about buying the book until I saw this...
Re:videos for download (Score:2)
The point being, what does one thing have to de with the other?
Perceptively? (Score:2)
I'm assuming he used the word 'perceptively' because Daisey himself is American? Otherwise the words 'repeatedly and often' might have been more appropriate.
You forgot the best part! (Score:2, Funny)
The Book is $13.80 at DoubleDiscount.com (Score:4, Informative)
The irony is too much... (Score:4, Funny)
Now if you've take a gander at LNUX recently, you see a company struggling from being delisted [yahoo.com]. Yes, Katz is a writer on a strange dotcom.
Sorry to sound trollish, but the irony is killing me...
Re:The irony is too much... (Score:2)
That wouldn't by any chance include Katz, would it?
Who is this "we" character? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who the hell do you mean by "we"?
Speak for yourself, Jon.
Re:Who is this "we" character? (Score:2)
- Mark Twain
Re:Who is this "we" character? (Score:2)
geek digerati
Oxymoron? WTF?
Seriously, would any self-respecting geek (ok ok another oxymoron...but you know what I mean.
Now I get Katz. He's a digerati and they think that they're geeks, so he thinks that he's a geek. That single misconception probably accounted for most of the dotcom bubble and subsequent burst.
This will make a good bs filter. If you ever want to see if someone has a clue, ask them about how the rise of the "geek digerati" of the late 90's will influence the future of the Internet and communications. If they don't laugh at you for talking about geek digerati, they're one of them. Run.
Re:Who is this "we" character? (Score:2)
And in this case Katz is not just throwing the "Royal We" where it doesn't belong. He's gotten it completely backwards.
If anything, it was the geeks who said, "Yeah, selling books online. Nice niche. Good luck making money at it." It was the anti-geeks (business types, journalistic pretenders, scam artists, stockbrokers...) who thought Amazon (give me a break! Amazon of all things!) would be much more than, well, a place to buy books online at a good price.
"Amazon as revolution" doesn't even pass the initial "huh?" test. Geeks are exactly the kind of people who have the perspective to see a slightly new twist on an old idea, however cool, for what it is--not some overarching metaphor for revolutionary change.
In other words, it's just a freaking bookstore, and it's always been just a freaking bookstore. Katz needs to get over it, and himself. Failing that, how about if he just refrains from projecting his dumber ideas onto "geeks" just to knock them down, eh?
Creatures of Entitlement? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're damned straight. If I've given a business my money, I'm entitled to a reasonable exchange in products and/or services.
Long Distance (Score:2)
Ah, so that's where all the profits went. Telephone bill.
The ironing, er... Irony... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this guy must be smart, I mean he had the discipline to sit down a write a book about it, but it's simply just whining when you talk about a corporation losing it's vision.
Time and time again we see people like this, launching 'watchdog' books about a corporation for whom, for one reason or another, they were formerly employed by. Most of the time all something like this tends to do is give publicity to a company. (And if you know anything about business, any publicity is good publicity.) I think that such books like this only help to contribute to a larger problem.
I guess it's just important for these people to get something off of thier chest. I know as a consumer that I could care less about the intricate workings of many corporations of which I am a customer, as long as their prices stay low and their service remains acceptable.
Re:The ironing, er... Irony... (Score:2)
Anyone who's worked at Best Buy and hated it can probably relate.
Physician heal thyself (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to bitch, not so easy to build a business.
Re:Physician heal thyself (Score:4, Informative)
"Jeff Bezos built the business he wanted to build, not the one Mike Daisey wanted."
But Jeff Bezos misrepresented his business to investors, workers and the world--he led people to believe that they were participating in a dream of changing commerce forever when the reality was that he needed their faith to build up scale in order to survive the die-off when the bubble burst.
Were I a businessman, maybe building a company would be a good idea...but I am not. Instead I'm a much better writer and performer, so rather than "bitching" I've just discovered that I should do my job.
Re:Physician heal thyself (Score:3, Informative)
Mike Daisey did build a business - his book and touring show, based on his hilarious gripes. Sounds like he's done pretty well at it, too.
-Isaac
Re:Physician heal thyself (Score:2)
Bezos wanted to built a business that hemorraged mooney and was full of deadweight and ineffeciencies? What an interesting business plan.
Capitalism, Amazon, and Existentialism (Score:5, Insightful)
They are also by far the best major book distributor out there.
More to the point, they're still in business
The way I see it, "selling out" may have been the only real way to survive the dot-com crash. Now I know, they STILL havn't turned a profit, but unlike the legions of now defunct companies, they still have something of a chance of doing so. Survival, much as we may not like to admit it, occasionally depends on watching the stock value, and digging up some operating costs.
That isn't to say that the compitition doesn't have a few things going for them. I always found B&N's site useful for out of print books, and Books a Million's usually pennies cheaper, but both use somewhat shallow imitations of Amazon's site design.
I might not like everything about it, but I use Amazon VERY often, and until there's a clearly better alternative, that will not change.
p.s. fictionwise.com comes in a close second for my favorite literature site. I still cling to an absurd sense of optimism in regard to e-books.
Cool, quirky bookstore? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cool, quirky bookstore? (Score:2)
In situations where customer service is counted in seconds and not quality you have zero chance of improving that problem at hand.
I worked for a Gannett newspaper a while back. While I wasn't in the CS department, I heard many complaints. The problem was the CS calls were short and no one ever bothered to fix the problem... it was just reassure the person and send them on their way.
Now I understand if you have a million (plus now) customers you can't give them the "mom-and-pop" treatment but you can turn people away pretty quick. Now that information can spread like wildfire one bad experience with a company can make that company loose thousands of sales.
Good thing you haven't had a problem yet with amazon (or like store). You will find it hard to get things resolved. [Of course I'm speaking in theory only, amazon may now have great customer services. After knowing they contract their CS to India I'm not so sure I want to buy anything from there to find out. I put my morals over prices.]
Familiar echoes (Score:2)
I've seen all good people... (Score:5, Funny)
bah (Score:2)
I'd love it if they asked me that. Most companies only care about experience, rather than education or intelligence. You know how hard it is to get a job just because you didn't spend your college years in a series of mind-numbing intern peon jobs?
If Amazon were just a bookstore (Score:2)
Who's to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
But but but, but I'm used to schlepping over there and getting it NOW, and I don't really give a damn about the consequences of what I support.
The internet boom was about GREED, plain and simple. What excited people were the lottery-like dizzying ascents of companies like Amazon that happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everyone I knew who was in it was not interested in sticking around to make a great company: they were interested in making a big pile of money cashing in options. Like any lottery there can only be mostly losers in the end. It was certainly never about a better (or even significantly different) way of doing business or about a kinder, gentler anything.
So why not skip the book about what Bezos did to the internet and take a close look at what you all are doing to yourselves. OR alternately, slap an ecology sticker on your SUV, put on your f*ck microsoft t-shirt, and drive down to Starbucks for a Latte.
Cult corporations (Score:3, Interesting)
"You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."
Consider this against corporate cults...
- Apple: Apple is exactly what Thompson describes. Hell, just look at where Cupertino is on a map.
- Microsoft: Microsoft is less this hippie, dancing-around-a-campfire, karma-rules-all type of atmosphere, and more of the "old and evil". Microsoft is a cult that was militarized from the start. I think much more of McCarthy-ism and the struggle against the evils of communism when I think of Microsoft. Not that Linux is communism in the pejorative sense, but that Linux flies completely in the face of their existing model of practice and they react violently with all the FUD they can muster.
- Amazon: Amazon is like the group of hippies in the middle of some place like Topeka, Kansas, or maybe Salt Lake City, Utah. They see this revolution going on somewhere. And they think they've got the gist of it. And so they join in what they think is going on, but then realize very quickly that they're really just posers who don't understand the essence of the movement and then they sell out without really realizing that they never had it in the first place. Or buy in. Depends on your perspective. (Anybody ever see SLC Punk?)
Anyways, just thought the cult corporation is an accurate characterization.
-jag
Hyperbole (Score:2, Funny)
The world will never EVER forgive Amazon for being a big book store on the net.
EVER.
We must never forget, any of us.
We must build a monument, a museum and a national library to keep further generations from making the same mistake.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2, Interesting)
I was speaking about the investors and the dot-com hype wave that Jeff helped grow and propagate...there was no attempt to connect Amazon with national tragedies, infant death or the Khmer Rouge.
flippant indictments (Score:2, Informative)
Publisher's Weekly (off the B&N site): "Still, his incessant flippancy blocks real insight. At the end, when an imaginary e-mail to CEO Jeff Bezos turns unexpectedly vicious, readers may wonder how a man so aware of and so glib about his employer's flaws comes to play the role of the exploited proletarian."
"Incessant flippancy" and "unsparing, even brutal indictment" of [media/corporate-hype/ameracin-life]
And when did Jon Katz become a book reviewer anyways? Speaking of which, why is this article not filed under "book reviews"?
drove a Toyota hatchback (true.) (Score:2, Funny)
A Toyota Supra Twin-Turbo is still a hatchback, and a nice one at that.
-----
Sucked into a Katz article (Score:2)
What are you talking about?! (Score:2)
His anecdotal profiles of geeks who were not nearly as smart as they thought they were
From what I can tell of his website, the guy answered telephones for Amazon.
How does that allow him any insight into the technical side of the company?!
Bastard (Score:3, Interesting)
Here I am. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here I am. (Score:2, Interesting)
There's actually a breakdown of how the dog years thing works at the FAQ section of my site. It's rather annoyingly geeky, so I'll let you read it there yourself rather than breaking it all down here.
Read the First Chapter (Score:2)
My impression was that the author made some pretty poignant points but he blasted them at you so quickly they didn't always resonate. I was struck by some of his descriptions his status as a "slacker"
I do many things, but none particularly well. It is the art of not applying yourself, the only craft I have studied my entire life. Like so many others of my generation, I cherish the delusion that I have superpowers buried deep inside me. They're awaiting the perfect trigger -- radiation, a child in danger -- and in that defining moment I will finally know my birthright.
Not quite enough to entice me to buy the book but obviously a talented guy nonetheless.
Katz & Daisey -- a match made in heaven? (Score:2)
It must be really frustrating to have such a pure vision and yet be stuck, helpless, in a position where the rest of the world isn't rushing to implement your vision. Katz and Daisey surely deserve each other, but what the hell did we innocent
Cheers
-b
No problems or heartbreaks (Score:2)
So it was a crappy place to work -- another horror story of quasi-slave labor at a another dot com company; no news here.... quit bitching and move on in your life. No, wait -- this was a review by JKatz, now it makes sense!!
Bogus analogy (Score:2)
This is a completely bogus analogy.
A teenage cashier has access to a few hundred credit card numbers. If he stole them, all he would earn would be a few thousand dollars. Plus he would be easy to track down, as he was physically present in the restaurant. It is just not worth the risk to steal those credit card numbers.
Now, if I decide to intercept credit cards on the Net, I can do it anonymously and collect tens of thousands of CC numbers in a short time span. Then use the numbers to purchase jewelry and other expensive items on ebay and have them shipped express to a mailbox in Ohio. By the time the FBI closes down on the sting, I'm back in my native Elbonia enjoying the proceeds of my crime.
Selling (Score:2)
Jon Katz is not a writer. He has no love of writing and it shows. He is a puppet.
"We waste our lives working at jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need!" --Fight Club
That is capitalism for you. You can fake love (musician, writer, etc.) but you are simply dancing for the man above you. Wal-Mart doesn't like what you have to say? Tough. No sales for you. Like the quote states, Jon Katz article is more shit we don't need. There is no meaning or message--merely an emotional expose. He is dancing for the stereotypical Slashdot crowd--the one which hates Amazon because of their one-click patent. And the Slashdot crowd that was consumed with dot-com euphoria which has now become jaded. They need someone to blame, might as well blame a public figure such as Jeff Bezos.
Why should anyone care what one disgruntled employee, who is clearly a little jealous that he didn't get his millions "promised," have to say? I sure don't. Amazon gets items purchased to my front door in 3-4 days using standard shipping. The items are perfect in quality and the price is great. It is extremely easy to shop there and I actually like their customer reviews and how they pick items I might be interested in and display those also. It has worked for me, why should I care if Amazon.com is not some dot-com Holy Grail or capitalism revolution?
The dot-com and idealism was yesterday's fad. Today's fad is common sense and pragmatism. Tomorrow will be mostly sunny with a slight chance of rain.
A sudden realization (Score:2, Funny)
I hadn't looked at the byline.
My eyes slowly traveled up and to the left... could it be... no... it couldn't... Jon Katz!
Suddenly everything was thrown into slow motion -- an extended "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" echoed in my head as my other hand swiftly flew across the keyboard and slapped my mouse hand away from the mouse, just in time to prevent me from reading the article. It was just like in a movie. Well, a boring movie about a guy reading /., but still...
Don't even ask me how I got into the article so I could reply to it -- it involves ninjas, monkeys, and a nuclear submarine.
Uhhh....Jon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bzzt. Sorry, Jon. Please Play Again. And next time? Try to at least get some of the facts right.
21 Dog Years was a play long before it was a book...Daisey put it on in Seattle in a few different theaters, including the back room of the speakeasy.net cafe! I saw it there about 2 years ago (before the cafe burned down).
As for Brooklyn, Daisey didn't leave for New York until this year. He'd been putting the show on in Seattle for several years by that time...
Want to save money on Tech books? Use Bookpool (Score:2, Informative)
Don't Cry For Me Amazontina !!! (Score:2)
So fucking what. Is it better to be one of the bazillion laid off Lucent, Siemens, Motorola, ATT, Nortel, Cisco, yadda yadda employees?
The Short Version (Score:4, Funny)
He thinks his boss is a slave driver.
His boss won't listen to his pet ideas.
Therefore the company sucks and is overrated.
Show2Book - Old wine in New Bottles (Score:3, Interesting)
In interviews, he's almost unwatchable - think Quentin Tarantino meets Eddie Haskell - waaaaay too much energy for the pedestrian content and waaaaay to sickly-sweet-cute for anyone who's not got an insulin pump and extra batteries for it.
This guy's apparently doing it just to hear his himself talk, because there are far better stories to be told. As Rob Reiner once related, Don't say it's a hot day today - everyone already knows it's hot and you just reminded us. Don't say you like pie - everyone likes pie and you didn't bring any with you. But say something true, say something original, and the world will beat a path to your door.
As for desks made of doors - what's to wonder about? Could you imagine the Amazon bottom line if every employee had the full Herman Miller setup?
See how annoying one man's superfluous rant can be?
Re:Why is Amazon bad? (Score:2)
Re:The worst day of his life?! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not certain what iteration of the show you saw, but while I certainly agree that a person should take their life affirmation from the work they do and not care about their coworkers, I was not that good a person.
I wouldn't describe myself as bitter--in fact, I'd say that the book/show describes the arc of learning to accept the lives we have and figure out what we should be doing. I don't really have a liberal ax to grind.
Re:oh god this guy had it coming.... (Score:4, Funny)
I know that kind of guy--man, I hate that guy. He sucks. I hope he never amounts to anything, the bastard.
Re:oh god this guy had it coming.... (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, what a jerk! Stupid jerky face poo poo man!