willheis

The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people. Also, I can see how my friends who use alexa (and google for that matter) have adapted their vocal cadences and vocab to interact with the device. And at the end of the day it is a way for people to play music, get news/weather reports, and order more goods. All things that are already very easy on smartphones/web browsers.

As for Go, I have never seen a corner shop, either in the US or in Europe, with such a tiny density of goods. It is designed to look like a Safeway or a Kroger but then is "intentionally" a small store. It's fine if this is still in the trial stage but that is what it felt like, instead of feeling like an actual shopping experience I would use day to day. Also, there was no one else in the store at all, during each of the 3 times I went, so I am still going to wonder what the success rate will be when tracking lots of people constantly picking up and putting down items.

And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said.

Tell that to Twitch and Ring employees. The consolidation of the tech industry is pretty apparent and I would put a lot of money on Amazon being one of the "final four" of the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I'll accept the logistics management part of Prime and AWS as obviously major achievements, but Alexa, Prime Video and Go?

Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier, and every so often tells a child exactly how to electrocute themselves.

Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience.

And having moved to Seattle recently, I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.

This seems like pretty hand-wavy thinking. Decision making can be thought of as a directed graph, where you have various situations as nodes and actions as edges.

That does indeed mirror how games work, however for all of our systems we do not perfectly know the actual "true" state of the graph. Even the oldest, simplest, most well understood systems are not understood perfectly. The fog of war is ever present.

To present systems management without the "intricacies of computers" you either have to not care where the actions lead you, or have a system that is perfectly understood. And if the latter is the case, then there is literally 0 value in a human pressing the buttons.

This happened to everything it could at least 10 years ago. It turns out that if you want software that works (at all), you need to pay people well, regardless of where they are in the world. Stop reenforcing this notion that leads to massive overwork and burnout in the US (+ Canada). Germany, the UK, Sweden, etc all have much, much better working conditions for software devs and their jobs aren't going away

Obviously on-call has to cover holidays but Christmas eve is a work day for everyone (in an office) at your company? Why stay? That is simply barbaric