Slashdot Mirror
Amazon.Heartbreak
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.
Anyone know if this is available at Amazon? :)
Buy it from Amazon and eff 'em both.
Instead, you can just go to the actual page instead of going through the advertisement provider.
Sounds like a new COunrty/Western song might be in the offing. . .
You are not the customer.
The book is $18.40 at bn.com but only $16.10 at amazon :)
:)
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Would it have been so hard to build a cool and quirky bookstore instead of a soulless virtual megamall?
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"
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
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
...in Portland. And I live in Seattle! The Seattle show was sold out by the time I heard about it and I actually drove to Portland with my girlfriend to see it. Was it worth it? Totally. This guy's hilarious! I don't know how well it translates into book format (a lot of sight gags) but be sure to catch his play if he comes to your town.
The author of the book has his own weblog, www.mikesdaisey.com, wherein you can download videos of his shows.
> The American consumer, Daisey perceptively points out, is a creature of entitlement
;)
I'm assuming he used the word 'perceptively' because Daisey himself is American? Otherwise the words 'repeatedly and often' might have been more appropriate.
"Old man yells at systemd"
21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, Daisey's hilarious, heartbreaking and surprisingly powerful recounting of life inside what may be the world's strangest, most ephemeral company -- a symbol of all that was exciting, misguided, and ultimately misunderstood about business online during the mad years. It's also one of the best books ever written about the Net, an unsparing, even brutal indictment not only of hubris, but of media and, of course, the corporate-spawned hype that shapes so much of American life--as characterized in the post Sept 11th American culture. :)
http://www.doublediscount.com/detaildisplay.asp?Pr odCat=1&ISBN=0743225805
Jon Katz, an employee of the "dot-com" Slashdot, owned by OSDN, subsidiary of VA Lin^H^H^HSystems writes about the grief and sorrow of a man's thoughts on the idea behind a strange by a dotcom.
Now if you've take a gander at LNUX recently, you see a company struggling from being delisted. Yes, Katz is a writer on a strange dotcom.
Sorry to sound trollish, but the irony is killing me...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Who the hell do you mean by "we"?
Speak for yourself, Jon.
You're damned straight. If I've given a business my money, I'm entitled to a reasonable exchange in products and/or services.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Ah, so that's where all the profits went. Telephone bill.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
This is really funny. On top of being a pointless rant about the rise of an industry giant, the fact that this book can be found on Amazon.com is even funnier.
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.
Linux is dead.
LU
Jeff Bezos built the business he wanted to build, not the one Mike Daisey wanted. If Mike Daisey wants a different kind of business, he should build it himself.
It's easy to bitch, not so easy to build a business.
The antenna on your tin-foil hat isn't a perfect 45 degree angle! QUICK! FIX IT BEFORE THEY FIND YOU!
I won't debate for a moment the idea that Amazon is a massive, greedy, corporate mega-mall. To wander around their site is to be bombarded with advertisement after advertisement, ad nauseum.
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.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
Sorry, but I don't want a "cool and quirky bookstore". The souless virtual megamall works just fine - if I want a book, it's there. I don't go to Amazon to have fun, I go there when I need something.
This space intentionally left blank.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
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?
This article seems to assume that I already think Amazon is bad. I don't assume that, but moreover, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to assume that.
Can someone explain to me what it is that they're doing that I'm supposed to be shocked by? From the article, the black mark against them seems to be that they wanted to make money. I'm pretty sure that's not all there is to it.
Someone please help me out.
pooptruck
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.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Way to slip an affiliate link into that story. Care to share your new-found riches with the rest of us?
I found that C|Net's Skinny Dubaud's review to be much better and extremely short. It also covers the play at New York's Cherry Lane Theater that Mike Daisey is doing, as well as the new F'ed Company book. I learned more in three paragraphs of reviews there than I did with three pages of Katz.
I really do like the analogy of these corporations to religious cults. And in some ways, that's very true. But I keep thinking of Hunter S. Thompson:
"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
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
"What you sacrifice reveals what you value, and you're a fool if you think the world will forgive you in the end."
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.
"Sig free in '03!"
I saw a video of his one-man show where he discussed a lot of this material. I thought it was going along just fine until he makes the discovery that everyone BUT him in his department is worth millions of dollars. In the video I saw, he calls that day the worst of his life. Excuse me? Just because someone is more ANYthing than you, does that somehow detract from who you are? (And by corollary, just because someone is less of SOMEthing than you, does that make you a bigger person?) Not me. I think the revelation is more than a little telling. He's bitter about being left out. Well, no one said life was fair, and it's only the left-wing nut-balls that think that we must somehow force it to be so. (And yes, I'm a right-wing nut-ball.) He then goes on to talk about how he ``used to have a soul, used to have values,'' and used to think that the Republican party was thinking correctly about taxes. I felt suckered. Here I thought I was watching an insightful commentary about a landmark of the ``dot-con'' era, and in the last 10 minutes, he turned it all into a completely liberal socio-political commentary. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If that's your thing, have a great time. Just know up front that I think he would do the same in the book.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Jon Katz: "It's also one of the best books ever written about the Net, an unsparing, even brutal indictment not only of hubris, but of media and, of course, the corporate-spawned hype that shapes so much of American life."
... sounds like this is the perfect read for all the slashdot readers who want need more ammo for their flippant indictments of corporate america for their next heated debate at the coffe shop.
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"?
I read about it in a at least month old mag at the doctors office last week.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
drove a Toyota hatchback (true.)
A Toyota Supra Twin-Turbo is still a hatchback, and a nice one at that.
-----
I wasn't logged in and thus inadvertantly read this Katz article, which I always keep turned off in my preferences. I'm not that interested in the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees and all the terrible things they must go through to afford their $400,000 houses. One thing I will say, however, is that although amazon.com may be a virtual mega-mall-evil-conglomerate, it is one of the best designed web sites I have ever come across and they know how to treat their customers. I used to hate them until I actually gave them a try. I still prefer to support smaller businesses such as Powell's Books, but one could certainly do worse than to emulate the quality you can get from Amazon.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I know that kind of guy--man, I hate that guy. He sucks. I hope he never amounts to anything, the bastard.
http://www.satirewire.com/news/june02/economy_of_e rrors.shtml
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?!
I'm a 2000 man.
Jon Katz makes a few cents everytime someone clicks on that link he put in the story. Slick bastard. He probably made $50 already.
I wrote the book, and as an ardent /. reader I thought I'd take a moment and post. I've addressed a couple of issues in other postings, and it can be difficult to give clear answers to people who haven't read the book but are working off a review (or less in some cases) but if anyone has any questions I'll give them a shot.
You can get the entire first chapter off Barnes and Noble.
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.
Why offtopic? Jon Katz wrote the article
here and save $2.30.
The link to the survey points to a news story (at the time of writing) which, um, is about a sexually frustrated dolphin.
Virgin Radio
http://www.bananagold.com
Generally requires fewer steps than a "real" Amazon order, and Banana has "hacked around" Amazon's saying 'no' to accepting e-gold, by simply grabbing the e-gold Amazon could have had for themselves! Amazon goes along with this, though they seem to get the raw end of the deal, IMO.
JMR
Speaking only for myself. I sell e-gold, but I own no part of bananagold.com, I'm just another satisfied customer who'll never need to use Amazon itself again.
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I figure these two should collaborate on a book. Or better yet, a 20 volume treatise on the failings of everything and everyone in modern society, and what the symbolism of those failings really means. They both have a unique insight into how the world should operate, and what other people should do with their time, money, and energy.
/.'ers who actually work for a living do to deserve *them*?
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
I'll take my chances with the PC police, and somehow I suspect that people will still be able to figure out that slavery is a bad thing. Give people some credit, for God's sake.
I went to see this show in it's current run at the Cherry Lane Theater in NYC. If you've got the choice, read the book instead of seeing the show though. Mike Daisey's writing would be better served by an actor other than himself. He writes with whit and a biting and hilarious insight, but he's a very self-conscious performer and it really detracts from enjoying the material.
Keep writing, Mike. Just stay away from the stage.
The harder you try, the luckier you are.
No. He meant the business of entertaining. Daisey wrote a play first and then this book. He's quite a showman. I loved the movie.
You're right! It's doubleplusungood to use words and phrases that colorfully convey an idea.
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!!
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Yeah, what a jerk! Stupid jerky face poo poo man!
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
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.
So let's see...
Cheap prices, easy to sue interface vs. quirky?
We sit around and defraud our employer and raise our ratings by cheating and then complain about being outsourced?
People expect to get what they paid for painlessly?
Sounds like the typical world owes me everything without doing work b!tch
He portrays Daisey here as a wage slave? So who _doesn't_ have to work to get your pay (and still sleep at night)? And don't say he was "locked in" at Amazon, in those days jobs were easy to find.
Hey Jon Katz, since you get paid to write, are you a whore, or a slave? Or both?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The theme of this article is about selling. Everyone lives (in capitalism) by selling something. If you work a 9-5 job you are selling your time to a company (whether you know it or not). Jon Katz is selling himself by riding the bandwagon. He does this with Sept. 11, Columbine and the Open Source(TM) revolution. There is no revolution. There is one big fucking marketing campaign after another. The author of this book is selling his books by tearing down his former employer. Jon Katz is selling himself and this article by the Amazon.com one-click and /. anti-patent idealism connection (even if he never outright admits it). Before the one-click issue Amazon was generally fine by most people (/. had an Amazon-friendly attitude). Now that /. has an anti-Amazon attitude, Jon sells (markets) towards that.
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.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
"Daisey...long ago fled Starbucks-land for Brooklyn...where he has prospered, adapting his book into a successful off-Broadway play."
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...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Bookpool has the cheapest/best selection of tech books period. I don't work for them, but have used them on many an occasion. They can really make a training budget go a long way.
Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement. --Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
Boo Hoo, Amazon's weird.
So fucking what. Is it better to be one of the bazillion laid off Lucent, Siemens, Motorola, ATT, Nortel, Cisco, yadda yadda employees?
A strange twist of fate led me and some friends to see this show back in April when it first opened. I have to say it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Daisey is hilarious and a master of intelligent and biting satire and performs with an intense and seemingly limitless energy. Dispite Katz's usual love of dramtics and invoking cosmic significance, the show really is great. I saw it once for free and the talked some other friends into coming back with me to see it agian. If your ever in New York I would definately reccomend it.
(I know this sounds like a plug, and I guess in a way it is, but it's so funny and I really hope it succeeds.)
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
A guy doesn't like his job.
He thinks his boss is a slave driver.
His boss won't listen to his pet ideas.
Therefore the company sucks and is overrated.
From the start, this guy struck me as a self-promoting, cloying whiner. He still does. Of course so do Bezos, Jobs and Gates, but with them it's a side-effect of changing the world.
;-)
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?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Man, if only I had the power, that is +5 Funny.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
... it's just a freaking bookstore, and it's always been just a freaking bookstore.
Right, a "bookstore" where you can buy games, electronics, toys, computer parts, cameras, barbeque grills, and patio furniture. New or on consignment. Where everything from DVDs to wind chimes can be reviewed by the people who bought it (yes I take the reviews with a grain of salt). Find me a physical store where you get this kind of selection and information.
Amazon has problems, no argument there, but they also have been using technology in ways that you shouldn't trivialize.
It's absurd to say that Amazon.com can't succeed because of shipping and customer service costs.
Amazon.com's business is identical to that of a mail order company. Take Land's End as an example. The company takes in orders from phone and the web, ships the orders out, and handles customer service by phone and e-mail. While e-commerce companies avoid the high costs of printing and mailing catalogs, the costs of the software and hardware systems to run the web site are similar. E-commerce is nothing new. It's not a scheme. It's not doomed from the start. It's identical to the well established mail order business.
It seems to me that Daisey is overdramatizing his brief stay at Amazon to try to increase the sales of his book. His creditability is damaged by his admission of morally questionable actions, including calling themselves to improve efficiency numbers, stealing, and pretending to be a supervisor. Daisey describes himself as lazy, dishonest, and disloyal. While he tries to smear everyone else at Amazon as equally pathetic, perhaps it's just him.
During the height of the dot.com boom, Amazon could do no wrong. After the crash, Amazon can do nothing right. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
I've been using Amazon since, oh, 1995? 1996? when I placed my orders using the Lynx browser. I've used it, mostly, for books that I would never have found in a retail store. But I've also bought current bestsellers. And CD's.
My experience with them has been excellent, right up there with Land's End or L. L. Bean.
And, yes, I've dealt with their customer service representatives on the phone and via email. And gotten intelligent, responsive service.
I still feel grateful to Amazon for once helping me be a hero to my daughter. This was maybe in 1997 or '98. She called me, distraught, because the college bookstore had sold out of a textbook she needed and wasn't going to have any more in stock for six weeks. (The bookstore had screwed up someone--she said only about two-thirds of her class had their books). I ordered it from Amazon, second-day air, and she had it the same week. (Yes, it cost about $15 more than buying it at the store would have).
I've also used it to buy CD's by a Dutch group called the Beau Hunks... CD's of the Raymond Scott Sextette... CD's of authentic 30's recording of klezmer music. Try to find these in Tower!
I don't know whether Amazon can make money. And I certainly don't regard it as a way of SAVING money. I regard it as a way of paying a small amount extra for premium service--and easy access to hundreds of thousands of titles that get sent directly to my door.
I mean, they just have given ME very good service. Fast, reliable, no major screwups. Shipping is usually faster than promised. Credit cards are not charged until the item ships. And Amazon was the first company to keep me informed via email when the product actually shipped.
The WORST that's ever happened to me was one occasion when I got emails at approximately two-week intervals for about three months, each announcing another two-week delay in the availability of an item that supposedly "ships in 4-5 days." Eventually I cancelled the order, no problem.
And they're STILL one of the few places that give you an easy way to include a note when you're sending something as a gift.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Chill out man. First off your taking this WAY to serously. I don't care what your points are, you don't need to go around worrying about Amazon.com all day, warning your friends yadda yadda yadda.
How did they brake up a union? A small group in customer service was thinking about starting a Union fine. Amazon shut down is CS in Seattle, not because of a Union but because it was too expensive.
That's fine if you don't want to shop there, whaterver reason (privacy I guess). But taking it as far as you are sounds like your just trying to give yourself an ulser.
If privacy is your main issue, then I suggest never giving the post office a change of address form, and don't bother applying for credit cards or any other major loan.
Can you even give me one example where Amazon.com has screwed you? I doubt it.
Die roll: result
0-20: He was worth billions but rented an apartment and drove a Toyota hatchback (true.) He worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com (true).
21-40: He is really a wererat, using his position of power to infect others with lycanthropy (false).
41-60: He slept only three hours a night (false).
61-80: He imprisons former followers who have turned on him in the dungeons beneath old book warehouses. Mike Daisey is the only one who managed to escape (false).
81-99: He still responded to e-mail at his public address, jeff@amazon.com (true).
00: Roll twice on table 1.
takes you to Barns & noble but I found that I can get it two bucks cheaper from Amazon.com.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Not one 'Post-9/11' reference! wtf?!
Daisey's hilarious, heartbreaking and surprisingly powerful recounting of life inside what may be the world's strangest, most ephemeral company
Ok, if Amazon is so ephemeral, how come it's still in business? Reading the review, one would think Amazon was broke, out of business, and gone to the great DNS in the sky. It's still around. Maybe they're not doing everything right, but they're doing something.
This movie portrays what the net boom was all about. Consultants and partners who got bought out for way too much, expectations of success in a sea of able competitors, and the inevitable reality-check that comes way too late.
Get it at Amazon!
-- thinkyhead software and media
It's well written (unlike so many of the one-person shows we get--take that Bea Arthur) and he's a very entertaining presenter. He's a big guy and sweats up a storm, which is funny and and not off-putting, since he's so involved in his story. I thought the weakest part was the imaginary e-mails to Mr. Bezos. But some of it was lost on my boyfriend who is not a dot-com guy. And he does NOT come off like a whiner: he's just a guy who got sucked into something bigger than he was (and don't forget, he's a big guy!) and is passing on his experiences. Three-and-a-half stars (out of four).
George Soros' book offered a ton of concrete solutions. A welcome break from disingenuous rhetoric of the Right and the clueless whining of the disenfranchised. The current state of affairs is not without problems but I think most pragmatists would agree that capitalism sucks less.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bezosCux8oo.G t3%40netcom.com
Live web cams
huh, I always thought BezOS was an operating system
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Give that buck to me.
This might be slightly off-topic, but when I first saw the word "trifecta" a few years ago I looked it up in a dictionary. The official meaning then (and still) is "a system of betting in which the bettor must pick the first three winners in the correct sequence." I think it's extremely interesting that since then I've seen the meaning change in public perception from that to "a triplet of any three items," and everyone seems to still know what it means.
Okay, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. ;-)
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
..then i saw JohnKatz had posted this piece - DAMN! now i know it's in fact, NOT a good book, just another POS that he found written up somewhere, and decided to share with us unfor^H^H^H^H^H lucky slashdot readers.
:-)
Microsoft is to programming what McDonald's is to fine cuisine.Bah..
I've truly got to go edit my prefs to not show his posts any more..
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
Yeah, I can't count the number of times after a fast, efficient, complete, comprehensive Amazon search of both new and used books, media and products, having found and bought exactly what I want at a good price, that I've said to myself: "What this site really needs is to waste some of its technical and spiritual resources on some asshole's personal conception of what is 'cool' and 'quirky'". Then let's punch it up a notch with a bunch of cool Flash animations and ActiveX controls!
If I want "cool" and "quirky", I'll go to a real bookshop downtown, or buy a nad-massager at Brookstone's. When I'm on the Internet, the last thing I need is some kind of a glorified "cool" and "quirky" vanity site. I want to find what I need quickly, buy it, and get the hell out.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Thanks! I've added the "Quenten Tarantino meets Eddie Haskell" to my .sig collection, and it's rare that I run into someone who dislikes me so thoroughly--it's refreshing.
I agree there are far more stories to be told, and better ones--and I will be doing my job, telling them. I appreciate your support.
-J
At this point in time, with Amazon being one of the last survivors of the dot-com shakeout, it seems that, instead of talking about what is wrong with Amazon, it would be more interesting to hear what they did right, as compared to all of the firms that are no longer with us.
You know, although many of the things Daisey says about Bezos are true, it's worth keeping the following thing in mind:
Jeff Bezos dreamed of the ultimate bookstore made available to us all, with effectively infinite stock, available to anybody anywhere in the world with access to the Internet and to American dollars. He made that dream really happen. And hundreds of thousands? millions? of customers take advantage of it every year, many in places where the newsstand is otherwise it as far as access to books goes. Now that ultimate bookstore is in Lubbock, Texas, and Moscow and Liberia too.
Did people have to work and have suckyish jobs to make that happen? Yes, but probably fewer than would have had to spend Clerks-like shifts in zillions of bookstores to let people buy that many books pre-Web. Indeed, Daisey is disappointed because the hope left. What percentage of people answering phone banks are hopeful about their current job even when they start? Maybe the job had a positive angle or two.
Was Bezos business plan cracked? Yes, no question. But the company is still in business, survived the crash unlike the truly questionable companies.
Was Amazon the tulip of the 90s? No question. I'm sure it was not easy for those in the company to be the focus of such, er, irrational exuberance.
12-18 months ago, Amazon was going to begin moving sections of their business to Vcommerce in order to start addressing the main criticism of their business model : absurd amounts invested in their warehousing.
...
In the end, they decided not to... why? Because they decided that if Amazon moved to a dropship network like Vcommerce, it would make Jeff Bezos look like he was wrong, and they couldn't allow him to look bad, regardless of what it meant to the company.
That's priorities for ya
IS it possible to find an enjoyable job that's profitable (to the extent one would consider "successful")? Myself, I love artsy stuff. You know, painting, literature, music. I know, or at least I've been told (most likely from corporate propaganda spreaders) that artists have really unsuccessful, poor, unhappy lives. Despite the fact that most of you are geeks, I would hope that many of you have had real-world experience and probably have some knowledge about this. Is the myth true? Do (real) artists live miserable lives? Is it possible to be happy with a job in IT?
I like lists, so let me put my questions in list form. I just hope (someone) will give this thread enough attention to respond.
- Is it possible to have a six-figure income and be happy doing what you do almost all the time? (Upper-management positions don't apply. I'm not a greedy scumbag, I wouldn't want that life.)
- Do most artists live miserable, economically (or otherwise) failing lives?
- Is it possible to be happy with a job in IT? (Yeah, well, you know, the stories!)
Pardon my bad, err, everything, I'm a bit tired. (Finals can really wipe you out.)
[insert witty comment here]