Amazon

Alexa.com (via MJTsai’s blog):

We will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022

Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.

Alexa.com was the go-to site to check web traffic. Back in the day, there were a handful of companies that regularly dominated the web traffic rankings. Memory serves, nytimes.com and Kottke.org were always near the top of the list.

From the Alexa Wikipedia page:

Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock.

Have to wonder when Amazon made the decision to use that name for its voice assistant and how much it helped that decision that they owned this domain.

Also wondering why they are shutting down the site. Is something new coming to Alexa.com, or is this purely not a viable business for Amazon?

Richard Lawler, The Verge:

People started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET, and just after 6PM ET the AWS Status showed “Many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services.”

That’s a pretty long stretch of downtime.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Among the services that reported issues as a result of the outage were Disney’s streaming subscription service, Disney+, Netflix, Slack, Ticketmaster, stock trading app Robinhood, and Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S.

CoinBase! If you’ve built a dependency on CoinBase for your currency transactions, your money was down most of yesterday.

The outage also brought down critical tools used inside Amazon. Warehouse and delivery workers, along with drivers for Amazon’s Flex service, reported on Reddit that they couldn’t access the Flex app or the AtoZ app, making it impossible to scan packages or access delivery routes.

Late last night, I got an email telling me a package was just delivered. I went out and checked, no package. No doorbell notification either. Then I put two and two together. I got a package late morning, right around the time the outage started, but did not get a notification. It took all day for the infrastructure to catch up, to notify me about a package delivered more than 10 hours earlier.

This dependence on AWS is a single point of failure, never a good thing.

Bloomberg:

The walls of his highly compartmentalized empire have been crumbling for some time. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be Jeff Bezos (at least by Bezos’s standards). He presides over a collection of properties that spans not only Amazon but The Washington Post, several philanthropies and a space company, Blue Origin LLC, that lags far behind its chief rival, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

This is a great take on Bezos stepping down and the freedom that offers Amazon without the political weight of The Washington Post and the fractured attention pull of Blue Origin.

Follow the headline link, click through the 5 picture gallery. That is some design. A double-helix, covered with trees.

The article itself is filled with details on this coming, Arlington, Virginia headquarters. Design aside, there’s a lot to like about the space, including plans for LEED Platinum sustainable energy, and:

Amazon aims to make PenPlace an energetic, 18-hour district that is open to the public and enlivened by local art, including an Artist in Residence program in The Helix, Schoettler said. Local businesses will also be incorporated into the campus.

Same design firm that did Amazon’s Seattle “spheres”.

NBC, Washington:

Seventeen Amazon packages have been delivered to Catherine Mayfield’s home in Temple Hills, Maryland, since October. She didn’t order any of them. Some of the packages included cheap items, such as scissors, a foot cushion and an eyebrow trimmer. Others contained pricier items, like a steam iron.

So what’s going on? One likely possibility: Mayfield is a victim of what’s called a “brushing” scam.

And:

Sellers do this to boost their ratings. They make a fake account using a real name and address they can easily find online. The seller buys the product from themselves and sends it to the address.

“In order for you to have a validated purchase so that your rating carries more weight, they actually have to ship something,” said Hamerstone. The seller then writes a fake review and gives themselves five stars.

So when you see those “verified purchaser” labels on Amazon reviews, dig a little deeper. When I buy something on Amazon, I start by looking at the percentage of 1-star reviews. Any percentage above 6% gives me pause, no matter how many 5-star ratings a product has. I read those 1-star ratings. Often there’s a clue there, a red flag that goes beyond, “dead on arrival” (bad units happen with all manufactured goods), something on the order of “this product was shoddily made, and here’s why I say that”.

Unfortunately for those receiving these packages, there’s really nothing they can do about it except to just wait for it to stop. It’s just too much for sites like Amazon to track these sellers down.

And that’s where we differ. Amazon created this process. Surely they could tweak their system so verified purchases are actually “verified”. Make it easy to report unordered packages, then have Amazon note on the product pages that the product has an active brushing scam.

UPDATE: Check out the site Fakespot. Copy the link to an Amazon product you are looking at and paste it in the Fakespot search field (upper left of the page). Fakespot will tell you all sorts of things about that product and, perhaps, help you avoid buying a dud.

There’s also a Chrome extension, if Chrome is your thing. No Safari extension, sadly. [H/T, Kirk McElhearn]

Dana Mattioli, Wall Street Journal:

Jeff Bezos built Amazon.com Inc. from his garage with an underdog’s ambition to take on the establishment. He imbued staff with an obsession to grow fast by grabbing customers using the biggest selection and lowest prices.

And:

That ethos helps keep Amazon booming. Aggressive competition—including wresting market share from rivals—is often a hallmark of a successful business. It’s also why the tech-and-retail giant is the target of rivals, regulators and politicians who say its tactics are unfair for a company its size, and potentially illegal. As the company has grown, so has its capacity to take on an ever-growing array of competitors.

And:

Executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike—an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear.

No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said.

And:

When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team.

The article goes on and on, but you get the idea. The sense here is that Amazon wants to replicate every product it sells, discarding partnerships once they have their own version of that partner’s product.

At what point does this turn into unfair business practice?

Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon on Tuesday is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out.

John Gruber:

I’m happy to hear more details, but on the surface this sounds insane. Why in the world would anyone voluntarily send their palm print to any company to store in the cloud? With something like Face ID and Touch ID, your biometric info is not only stored solely on your own device, it’s stored on the secure enclave on your own device. Even the apps running on your own device can’t access it.

And:

This is a terrible idea and the only reason I can think of why Amazon created it is that they wanted their own payment system and felt they had to use some kind of biometrics for identification, privacy implications be damned, because they don’t have any sort of mobile device platform they could use instead.

I’m guessing there are a ton of people who will follow along, scan their palms unknowingly, in the same way they respond to a Facebook survey asking them where they met their spouse or what their first pet’s name was.

At the very least, as John intimated, this feels like Amazon trying to disrupt Apple Pay and the like.

Back to Recode:

The company expects to sell the technology to other retailers, like it began doing earlier this year with its “Just Walk Out” technology — the cocktail of cameras, sensors, and computer vision software that powers Amazon Go stores. Kumar said the Amazon One pitch to other retailers is straightforward: reduce friction for your customers at checkout, thereby shortening lines and increasing how many shoppers are served along the way.

There’s the overt business model. But what’s not clear is what Amazon will do with this treasure trove of intimate biometric data in the long haul.

Spencer Soper, Bloomberg:

A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is a real sign of the times. And, I suspect, a hack that will quickly spread beyond Chicago. Desperate for work, drivers have figured out that Amazon’s dispatch software hands off deliveries to the driver closest to the Whole Foods store with the goods to deliver.

Follow the headline link to see an example of one such tree. From what I’ve read, Amazon appears to be aware of the behavior. I’m assuming drivers hang their phones and then park nearby, with an eye on their phone.

Reddit:

Since I started noticing this issue, I’ve gotten counterfeit batteries, counterfeit shampoo, and counterfeit guitar strings, and they were all sold by Amazon.com. It got so bad that I completely stopped using Amazon.

The bigger question is “what the hell is going on?” This didn’t seem to be a problem, say, 5 years ago. I started looking into why this was the case, and I found a pretty clear answer: commingled inventory.

And:

Let’s say I am a third-party seller on Amazon, and I am selling Crest Toothpaste. I send 100 tubes of Crest Toothpaste to Amazon for Amazon fulfillment, and then 100 tubes are listed by me on Amazon. The problem is that my tubes of Crest aren’t entered into the system as “SolitaryEgg’s Storefront Crest Toothpaste,” they are just entered as “Crest Toothpaste” and thrown into a bin with all the other crest toothpaste. Even the main “sold by Amazon.com” stock.

This is a fascinating read. In a nutshell, the logic here is, commingled inventory means a counterfeiter can dump their bad goods into the river of genuine goods and never get caught, since the goods are not validated until the end user receives them.

Not sure this is fixable, since the cost of validating goods on the Amazon side would be enormous, a non-starter. One thing Amazon could do is prevent third party goods from entering the validated goods stream. That way, when you make a purchase, you could choose “validated” goods or “take a chance” goods.

[VIDEO] Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:

What do you call it when there’s a little voice in your head only you can hear? A hallucination?

Amazon calls it progress. I’ve been living with its latest talking artificial intelligence product, called the Echo Frames, for two weeks. They’re glasses with tiny speakers and a microphone so you can have your own private conversations with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant everywhere you go.

This new version of Alexa is much more proactive about chatting — and it has driven me bananas.

According to Amazon, there’s a waiting list to buy these things. I did get an invite, and wrestled with the idea of plunking down $180 to see this brave new world.

Reading/watching this, I’m really glad I didn’t. Don’t miss the video embedded at the top of the article.

My immediate thought on reading that headline was, “Why one year?”. To get that, here’s Amazon’s actual announcement:

We’re implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology. We will continue to allow organizations like Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Marinus Analytics to use Amazon Rekognition to help rescue human trafficking victims and reunite missing children with their families.

We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.

The headline linked CNBC article expands on this with coverage of IBM exiting the facial recognition business, and lots of other background snippets. Worth reading.

If you’ve not followed the story, start here.

After the story of Amazon VP Tim Bray quitting in protest went viral, Tim posted this follow-up, mostly about the tidal wave of responses to his original, but worth reading.

Also worth reading, the like-minded posts linked in Tim’s piece.

Tim Bray, now formerly a key part of Amazon Web Services:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

And:

VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Patience loading the page. Tim’s post made it to the front page of Hacker News over the weekend, big demand. It’ll load though.

A few additional links:

• Tim Bray’s Wikipedia page. Note the mention of Tim as one of the co-authors of the original XML specification.

• The Hacker News comments on this post. If you found the post interesting, you’ll no doubt appreciate the comments, likely representing some of your own thinking.

Over the weekend, Jeff Bezos sent out a memo to all employees. Follow the headline link to read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts: Across the world, people are feeling the economic effects of this crisis, and … Continued

Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon announced earlier this week that it would start prioritizing the most in-demand essential items in its warehouses, as the e-commerce giant struggles to keep up with customer demand during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Now the other shoe has dropped.

To be clear, there are definitely long shipping delays on certain items, but most Prime items I checked (as of this writing) still deliver in a few days. This is about demand and Amazon’s attempts to keep essential goods flowing.

One thing to keep in mind: Some delays don’t show up until checkout. On the product page, it might say 2 day shipping, but verify the arrival date on the checkout page before you complete your purchase.

Amazon blog:

Company will invest over $350 million globally to increase pay by $2/hour in the U.S., £2/hr in the UK, and approximately €2/hr in many EU countries for employees and partners who are in fulfillment centers, transportation operations, stores or those making deliveries so that others can remain at home.

And:

We also know many people have been economically impacted as jobs in areas like hospitality, restaurants, and travel are lost or furloughed as part of this crisis. We want those people to know we welcome them on our teams until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back.

No matter what you think of Amazon, the company is playing a critical role here, getting goods and food to people who cannot/should not be out and about. Amazon delivery people are on the front lines, much like postal and retail workers. To me, those raises are hazard pay.

Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire:

Two years after launching a chain of convenience stores without cashiers or checkout lines, Amazon is opening its first “Amazon Go Grocery” store in Seattle on Tuesday morning, enlarging the footprint for surveillance-style shopping and signaling a larger challenge to the broader world of brick-and-mortar retail.

Surveillance-style shopping! Gotta remember that one.

You enter the store and scan a QR-code, which is tied to your account, lets you pay for your groceries. Once you’re in:

Hundreds of cameras in the ceiling overhead make up the key technological component of the just-walk-out concept.

And:

The cameras are keeping track of those “interactions” with the product and know exactly what is being taken off shelves and put back. Allowing people to do this type of “considered shopping” plays into the Go Grocery concept of making sure that customers don’t have to do anything unnatural when it comes to how they shop.

This is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Not to mention the ethical problems involved in eliminating certain jobs from the chain. Great for Amazon’s financials, not so great for the humans involved.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

[VIDEO] The video embedded in the main Loop post addresses two issues. It shows how easy Amazon’s #1 best selling lockbox product is to break into (really, really easy).

But more importantly, it shows that the $20 product comes with a $10 Amazon gift card, which you can only use if you leave a five-star review.

And written on the back of the gift card:

Please DO NOT talk or post images about this rebate activity in your review content, otherwise it is invalid.

Assuming this video is accurate, is Amazon aware of this practice? Is this condoned?