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Bezos and O'Reilly 2.0
theodp writes "Looks like Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly are investing together again, and this time it has nothing to do with patent reform. In Bezos Goes Web 2.0 Wild, Private Equity Week's Alexander Haislip reports that Explore Holdings, which as of late has been doing business as Bezos Expeditions, is one of 19 investors that have pumped $34.3M into O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures."
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should spend more time working for Amazon.com. They used to be the best, but now they are a barely maintained database of discontinued products with bad specs and irrelevant search results.
Care to provide evidence of this before you're modded down by someone else into the depths of troll hell?
The no spin zone with AJAX and semantic tags.
The really advanced stuff is really obscure and really subtle. Not something cool hunters are likely to pick up on. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Amazon is still the best bookstore for in-print books. Since books don't have "specs" (except things like page number and dimensions, which I've never seen screwed up), I suppose you are bitching about electronics. Well, Amazon's core mission is books. Just because they branched out into other areas which weren't as successful doesn't mean that they suck entirely.
As for out of print books, often one can still order them through the "Used and new..." listings of third-party sellers. But even with a product is not available through any avenue on the site, I'd still prefer that Amazon list them. Why? Because people can review them, and give you an idea of whether you want to search for the book in more obscure venues. To take one example, I've recently discovered that Amazon lists the original Danish publications of Pia Tafdrup's poetry. A book like Tusindfoedt isn't available for order in the U.S., but I'm currently writing a review that will tell people this book is so good that it's well worth ordering it from Tafdrup's publishers Gyldendal in Denmark
Fine, mod me into obscurity for my opinions.
My point is that I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos to find the best tech investments, because his own company is doing a such a poor job of maintaining their own database, even in their core business. Do a search on something as simple as a book title (say, "War of the Worlds") then try and wade through the bizarre results. Of the top 5, one of them is actually a paperback copy of H. G. Wells' _The War of the Worlds_. Two of them are peripherally related (an illustrated version and a collection of short stories that includes it, I guess), and two results are not related in any way. In fact, most of the search results are for books on World War II, with copies of _The War of the Worlds_ buried in the search results.
Can I sort by book title? No. Can I exclude books with the wrong title? No. Can I sort by availability? No. Sort by author? No. Can I put quotes around the title and do an exact text search? No. Even in its core business, Amazon's site is only passable. And things haven't really changed or improved since the late 90s. I mean, what kind of book store doesn't let you search by author?
Search for CDs, for DVDs -- all the same problems. Get out of those core areas, and things get MUCH worse. Dozens of "unavailable" entries mixed into the search returns, bad specs listed for products, etc.
In summary, I don't think that Mr. Bezos would recognize a Web 2.0 application if it walked up and smacked him in the ear. I imagine he's a fine person, but I wouldn't take his investment advice for Web companies. He can't keep his own house in order.
> I don't think that Mr. Bezos would
> recognize a Web 2.0 application
On the other hand, Amazon is doing a bunch of innovative things, like the Simple Storage Service (S3). We're using S3 for indi (with encryption, of course), and it's very, very handy; it keeps us from having to build out a big storage infrastructure.
There's also the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) they're doing. I was at a Rails Edge conference last week and James Duncan Davidson did a nifty presentation on deploying Rails apps. The really neat thing, though, was that he deployed it to an EC2 machine rather than a local directory or even a local VMWare instance. Very cool stuff.
The Army reading list
Dang it, isn't one Bill O'Reilly already too many?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Jeff Bezos won't care, but what about Tim O'Reilly when he discovers a story about him on Slashdot only got 14 posts?