Amazon Unbound
"In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents a deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself--who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions; who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids." -- Amazon.com. 'Amazon Unbound' is an unvarnished picture of Amazon's unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time. From the author of 'The Everything Store'.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
6mentions
6people
2021–2022years
17% recommend83% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession."
Brad Stone's second book about Amazon ("Amazon Unbound") does a refreshingly candid and detailed job of explaining how this switch happened. It's tucked away in Chapter 10, I believe, and it never got as much media pickup as I would have expected.
For me, at least, grasping the extent of this transformation made it a lot easier to understand what I kept encountering.
- Also described in Brad Stone's book series "The Everything Store" and "Amazon Unbound"
- I am not sure this is actually true. I've been listening to the audiobook Amazon Unbound and there's a chapter on how Amazon's retail business was not profitable and was subsidized by other ventures.
- I started reading "Amazon Unbound" by Brad Stone, and in the part where he discusses the development of Alexa, my laymen self had never considered how difficult it would be to train that thing. I think the term was "far-field" speech recognition, and all the problems that come up when adding in real world variables. People talking from across the room while others are talking, or the TV is going, or as you said, reflections and other materials in the room.
I agree that it is disturbing they tried to use this as evidence.
- That's the feel I get from reading Brad Stone's "Amazon Unbound" .There were multiple instances where Bezos appear devoid of kindness towards employees.
E.g '...In 2009, Onetto’s human resources deputy, David Niekerk, wrote a paper titled “Respect for People,” and presented it at an S-team meeting. The paper drew from Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians. Bezos hated it. He not only railed against it in the meeting but called Niekerk the following morning to continue the browbeating. Amazon should never imply that it didn’t have respect for people embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said...'
"...Among the final straws for Onetto was a September 2011 story in the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The paper reported that the company’s warehouse in the Lehigh Valley had gotten so swelteringly hot that summer that workers were passing out and being transported to nearby hospitals by ambulances that Amazon had waiting outside. An ER doctor even called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment..."
"...Before the incident, Onetto had presented a white paper to the S-team that included a few paragraphs proposing to install rooftop air-conditioning units in Amazon’s facilities. But according to Niekerk, Bezos bluntly dismissed the request, citing the cost. After the Morning Call article drew widespread condemnation, Bezos approved the $52 million expense, establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media. But he also criticized Onetto for not anticipating the crisis. Fuming, Onetto prepared to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him to let it go, but he couldn’t. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Onetto was recommending. As other S-team members cringed, Bezos declared that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when Amazon puts people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
"...Bezos didn’t want another empathetic business philosopher to replace Onetto as the head of Amazon’s operations; he sought an uncompromising operator..."
- From https://stratechery.com/2021/distribution-and-demand/:
`I do get the argument that Prime Video is a waste of money for Amazon; Brad Stone notes in his new book Amazon Unbound that “there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior” and that “any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.”`
Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?
