If 80% is correct in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is it worth reading? Probably

AllthingsD has a post on an ex-employee giving The Everything Store 4 stars vs. Jeff Bezos’s wife Mackenzie Bezos’s 1 star.

Amazon’s First Employee Disses MacKenzie Bezos Review That Disses New Book About Amazon

NOVEMBER 5, 2013 AT 2:23 PM PT

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A day after MacKenzie Bezos, the wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, blasted a new book about her husband and his company in a one-star review on Amazon.com, Amazon’s first employee, Shel Kaphan, has published a four-star review of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store,” in which he recommends the book and criticizes MacKenzie Bezos’s take. (Kaphan confirmed to me that he is the reviewer.)

One of the things I have learned being closer to media is how much written is not really that accurate.  In one review of the book by an ex-amazon employee.

My biggest concern is that I have first-hand knowledge of many of the episodes in the book (high school, original web site, 9/11, earthquake, A9, Manber/Holden, Kindle, Netflix). Overall, from the parts that I know about, about 80% is correct and 20% isn't (often in details, but incorrect nonetheless). That, of course, taints my view of the book as a whole, because I have to assume that 20% of the stuff I don't have personal knowledge of is also incorrect.

That said, I would still recommend the book (and especially the picture of Jeff in High School!)

It is point well made give the lack of information on amazon.com as a business if 80% if correct is the book still worth reading.  Most likely yes.

I ran into an old friend on the plane on Monday who is an ex-amazon early employee.  We have had a good time discussing logistics methodologies.  I think talking about the everything store book may be a good coffee conversation.  Well, I guess that means I need to buy the book.  Huh, maybe I’ll make The Everything Store the first purchase on my new Kindle HDX 8.9 I’ll get tomorrow.

Who would have thought that the Tablet Wars are between Apple, Google, and Amazon

I have an iPad, Samsung Tablet, and a 1st generation Kindle Fire.   In the past month Apple, Google and Amazon have announced their new Tablets and CNET has a post on display quality.

iPad Air topped by Kindle Fire HDX in display quality test

The iPad Air has an "excellent" display -- but not quite as excellent as the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, DisplayMate says.

On Thursday I am getting a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9.  During the day I find myself spending time in amazon’s, apple’s, and google’s mobile OS.  The true test on the Kindle HDX is what my kids think.  They are always making fun of the number of things I use during the day.  One of these days they may understand what I am doing what all the devices creating a mobile service solution. When I try to tell the story of what I am building I feel like it is bedtime situation.  My family usually gets sleepy, nods their head, “uh huh”, “yea”, and they are ready to go to sleep. I’ve learned this lesson and don’t tell the mobile stories unless I have someone who has the problem set we are trying to solve.  That’s when they are awake. 

What is interesting is Amazon, Apple, and Google are each trying to solve a different mobile problem which is defined by their business model.

Want to work at Amazon? Can you stand the heat at the executive level?

I was talking to a Microsoft friend and he was saying how many amazon employees are showing up at Microsoft.  For a while there were a large amount of Microsoft employees were leaving for amazon.  Some of the more visible ex-Microsoft employees are Brian Valentine and Charlie Kindle.  These guys would be ones who would be close enough to feel the heat from Jeff Bezos.

Here is an article with 4 ex-Amazon executives in Puget Sound Business Journal.

Uncomfortable. Adversarial. A Darwinian struggle for survival.

These are all terms used to describe Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ relationship with his staff, according to four former Amazonians who have branched off from the e-commerce giant to start their own businesses.

One of the things you would need to get used to Amazon is doing more with less.  Way, way less.

“I would go home and throw stuff. One of my roommates was on a team where 20 people were doing the work of 300 engineers. We were all always on pager duty,” Selinger said. “But as I reflect on it, the problems we were tackling ended up having real value. We weren’t trying to solve things that obviously didn’t matter.”

Have you hit $50k a month on AWS? Do you have the itch to move?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow has a post on startups that have moved off of AWS.

Amazon Web Services: should you stay or should you go?

by Barb Darrow

4 HOURS AGO

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SUMMARY:

Startups love the flexibility and pricing of AWS. But then again, no one cloud is right for everyone. Here are a few startups who decided to move at least some of their workloads off AWS.

$50K is the magic number that gets discussed in the article.  One bigger player, not a startup is in the post with their views.

Paris Georgiallis, VP of platform operations for RMS, which builds catastrophe risk models for insurance companies, also put some credence in the $50,000 per month cut off, although he, cautioned that every user’s needs vary. “$50K a month equates to $1.8M of capital spend over 36 months. An experienced IT team can work miracles with $1.8M in infrastructure, especially in a mid-to-large enterprise,” he said via email. 
RMS started out with AWS because well, it’s developers loved AWS. That appeal is Amazon’s ace in the hole. AWS “is winning the developer war much like Microsoft did in the 90s — by creating simple tools and eliminating infrastructure as a concern for developers that attraction is high.” The problem with that is developers tend to treat AWS as an all-you-can-eat-buffet which is fine — to a point. But with poor management of VMs and storage, costs can and often do skyrocket.

And, in the comment section is a reader who references his blog post of host their own server vs. softlayer in London.

The hardware experiment – London colocation

Written by David Mytton

Recently we’ve been reviewing the infrastructure that powers our server and website monitoring service, Server Density, and as a result we have started an experiment looking into buying and colocating our own physical hardware.

Currently, the service is run from 2 data centers in the US with Softlayer and we’re very happy with the service. The ability to deploy new hardware or cloud VMs within hours or minutes on a monthly contract, plus the supporting services likeglobal IPs is very attractive. However, we’re now spending a significant amount of money each month which makes it worth considering running our own hardware.

Amazon's A9 creates a video that tells the story of what it is like working for the company

Here is a video about Amazon.com's A9.  This video has only 392 views and is a humorous spin on working for A9.

What is most interesting to the data center crowd is their technical operations team.

Technical Operations

Our global team keeps Product Search and other services running 24x7.

 

Infrastructure That Scales.

Search and several related services we support are at the core of the Amazon business: they help customers find the items they want to buy. We are always online and ready to respond. 

Our globally distributed team oversees the smooth-running of all search system operations on Amazon sites in North America, Europe and Asia; our Client Services group provides hands on support for those that depend on A9’s search systems.

Besides our ultra-high availability frontline operations, we plan and scale with the fast-paced growth of search. We look at the data; we determine what services are needed; we implement solutions and we manage deployments. We are responsible for thousands of servers handling 100s of millions customer searches daily.

We stay agile so that we can adapt to unexpected change and exponential growth. We are ready when peak traffic surges, and we understand that yesterday’s record is going to be tomorrow’s average, so we always stay ahead with our infrastructure.

Collaborating across time and space.

The Search Operations team builds and runs the world's largest e-commerce product search. 

Our "follow the sun" operation is based in three locations: Palo Alto, Dublin, and Tokyo. Each of our teams can, during their work hours, address any issue in any locale as soon as it arises, giving it full attention.  

No matter what the volume of traffic, the conditions on the ground, or the intricacy of the systems, our services perform seamlessly for our customers, 24x7.

We manage critical capabilities—high availability, cross-platform, scalable product search and an advertising platform that serves advertisers and publishers alike—for our parent company Amazon and other clients.