Part Two- Just as the Winners Get to Write History...
So let's resume with 2009's shareholder letter in which, as usual, Bezos lapses into his corporate doublespeak, such as this snippet when he talks about setting goals while pretending Amazon doesn't care about profits-
Senior leaders that are new to Amazon are often surprised by how little time we spend discussing actual financial results or debating projected financial outputs. ... Focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time. 2009Now, I don't know why Bezos is telling investors that neither he nor the senior executive echelon at Amazon are focused on profits either in the long or short terms. Amazon is the same as any corporation in that their ultimate goal of achieving corporate primacy and maximizing as much profit as humanly and inhumanly possible is never far from his and his senior managers' thoughts.
And what Bezos says about controlling the processes in order to achieve maximum "financial outputs" sounds very reasonable on the face of it but Bezos is all about control to the near exclusion of all else.
According to Geoffery James of Inc.com, this is a partial laundry list of all the things largely controlled by Bezos and Amazon:
(I)t might surprise you to know that the fourth horseman of the digi-pocalypse, Amazon, may represent an even greater threat to democracy; After all, it's one thing to "own" the distribution of online news; it's quite another to own the distribution of absolutely everything else.
Bezos would never diversify into so many markets if he wasn't completely focused on world domination (a phrase that comes up more and more when people write about Amazon) and iron-fisted control (And that woefully inadequate list doesn't even include the Washington Post that Bezos bought for a quarter billion bucks or PillPack last June.). And for those of you who are more visual-minded, here's a helpful if frightening infographic that helps summarize the 10 ways that Amazon seeks to dominate the planet earth:So far, Amazon and its mega-billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos have, in addition to owning a growing percentage of the sales and distribution of consumer goods, either staked out or captured the following huge sectors of the world economy:
- Home services
- Smart homes
- Streaming entertainment
- Health care
- Managed hosting
- Groceries
- E-readers
- Parcel delivery
Many of the problems we face have no textbook solutions, and so we -- happily -- invent new approaches. 2010Because winging it when it comes to technology we're more likely to be mastered by than to actually master is fun and it's the maverick Jeff Bezos way of doing things! This statement was made the year before Amazon put on the drawing board a plan to create a vast cloud service for the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon that was vigorously applauded by the likes of James Clapper. Four years ago, this became a reality when the government signed a $600,000,000 deal with Amazon for just such a cloud. (As an aside, Amazon's denunciations of charges that it sells our information to the highest bidder is laughable when you consider its giant data centers, referenced in yesterday's article, when one remembers the simple truism that what gets harvested inevitable gets sold to that highest bidder.)
Not coincidentally, in that same year, 2014, Bezos hired a former IBM computer scientist, Srikanth Thirumalai, with the intention of him turning Amazon into an AI powerhouse. The results have been mixed to day the least, with the creepy Alexa and Echo often becoming international punchlines. Amazon's algorithms, as stated yesterday, are much worse than jokes, with authors and customers alike capriciously getting their accounts terminated and books banned with no explanation and no appeals process possible aside from the laughable option of Amazon's deliberately one-sided arbitration. And, again, if Amazon can ban bestselling novelists for no reason, with no warning and no explanation, they can do it to anybody. Are we listening, Vincent Zandri?
Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say "that will never work!" And guess what -- many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. 2011Wow, I cannot believe Bezos had the unmitigated gall to talk about circumventing gatekeepers. Let's start with all 13 of Amazon's publishing imprints, which includes Thomas & Mercer. For quite a few years now, Amazon had their imprints slam their door in the faces of authors looking for a real outlet for their work that's a lot more legitimate than Kindle or Createspace. Like the monolithic and almost as monopolistic Big Five publishers that Amazon loves to squeeze, you're not allowed to submit your work to them. Instead, you have to wait forever in virtually every case for these arrogant cunts to come to you and offer you a deal. And even then, the contracts are, typical for Amazon, one-sided and one-size-fits-all. Amazon seems at times to be made up entirely of gatekeepers, with very few of them being fellow human beings.
One advantage -- perhaps a somewhat subtle one -- of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to. 2012Again, with their fucking cult of the customer, which smacks its nose into reality when one hears about people getting their accounts terminated, as usual, without notice and without explanation as the generic form letters they send out by the bale that blame the customer for their undeserved victimization. And it makes little sense to create a need to do something then use it as a rationale for pre-emptively doing it. Sometimes it works wonders to stop what you're doing for a second to look over your shoulder and see what else the competition is up to. The onetime big shots who ran Friendster, Myspace and Borders, Inc. can tell you all about that.
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It's not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success. 2013Sure. Because as Thomas Edison once famously said when asked how he felt about 1000 of his inventions failing, "I didn't fail. I'd successfully found 1000 ways that didn't work." The thing is, while Amazon may famously embrace failure as a fact of life, Jeff Bezos hardly ever admits to personally failing (except when bragging about making billions off them) even though he has in many ways, beginning with his ongoing failures to more adequately serve its vendors, authors and customers who are victimized each and every day through its impersonal and inhuman capriciousness.
A dreamy business offering has at least four characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it's durable in time -- with the potential to endure for decades. When you find one of these, don't just swipe right, get married. 2014Again, if only Amazon had confined itself to those three business models, speculative fiction writers and fans would not now be penning frightening articles about Amazon's naked quest to dominate the world. They want to control the foods you eat through a colder, more impersonal version of Whole Foods and what drugs you ingest through its acquisition two months ago of PillPack. It's not Amazon's market share into these markets that's so scary. For instance, Walmart makes $481 million annually through food sales compared to Amazon's $136 million- It's how rapidly Amazon's market shares are growing even when compared to other corporate behemoths such as Walmart. If Jeff Bezos likens these business relationships to marriage, then he's obviously one very controlling and intolerant spouse.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible -- one-way doors -- and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly. ... If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren't like that -- they are changeable, reversible -- they're two-way doors. If you've made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don't have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. 2015Most decisions are reversible? Try telling that to the countless thousands of authors, customers and vendors you've victimized over the last two decades without them having any real chance of getting their victimization reversed. Ask Hachette what they think of your "reversible decisions." If you ask me, they should've dumped your corporate little ass and redoubled their commitment with Barnes & Noble.
To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. 2016Oh yeah, because making rash, lightning fast decisions is always something a CEO should make when they employ over 100,000 people worldwide. Such rash decisions include gouging Amazon Prime members this year by $20, growing so quickly they had to lay off hundreds from their corporate headquarters this year even as they're scouting out a tax-friendly location for a second HQ, and of course, the oft-mentioned bannings and terminations of hundreds of books and accounts that aren't even generated by humans. But, hey, Jeffie, here's to lightning fast executive decisions!
To achieve high standards ... you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be. 2017Bezos pontificating about "high standards" is like Ted Nugent talking about animal rights and veganism. That high quality mindset resulted in China selling us, as usual, its shitty products through Amazon, the declining quality of its streaming Prime videos despite the $20 rate hike and counterfeit products that Amazon, a company that prizes control over its processes, allows to be sold despite protests by those most immediately affected by them.
In the end, one must conclude that, its corporate culture aside, Amazon is all too typical of any other corporation except it's more dangerous than most. As with all internet-based corporation, they've long since outsourced human cognitive thought and judgment to algorithms that literally destroy careers and lives, their risible excuse for a customer service department seems solely dedicated to defending those brainless and destructive algorithmic decisions, they work their sweatshop workers to death, they demand tax cuts from every city in which they've set up a facility, they lie to and ignore their investors, they're in bed with police departments, the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon and they even ran a dirty campaign in Seattle to defeat a $500 head count tax already passed by the city council, a tax Amazon could've easily afforded, a tax that would have built low income housing units for Seattle's poor.
Corporations are extremely poor stewards of civic responsibility. Why should Jeff fucking Bezos and the corporate cunts at Amazon be any different?
posted by jurassicpork @ Monday, August 13, 2018
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