Will Amazon Become the Bell Labs of Consumer Products?
June 12, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
I did some work at Bell Labs and then at the Judge Greene crafted Bellcore (Bell Communications Research). My recollection is that the place was quiet, uneventful, and had a lousy cafeteria. The Cherry Hill Mall provided slightly better food, just slightly. Most of the people were normal compared to the nuclear engineers at Halliburton and my crazed colleagues at the blue chip consulting firm dumb enough to hire me before I became a dinobaby. (Did you know that security at the Cherry Hill Mall had a gold cart to help Bell Labs’ employees find their vehicle? The reason? Bell Labs hired staff to deal with this recuring problem. Yes, Howard, Alan, and I lost our car when we went to lunch. I finally started parking in the same place and wrote the door exit and lamp number down in my calendar. Problem solved!)
Is Amazon like that? On a visit to Amazon, I formed an impression somewhat different from Bell Labs, Halliburton, and the consulting firm. The staff were not exactly problematic. I just recall having to repeat and explain things. Amazon struck me as an online retailer with money and challenges in handling traffic. The people with whom I interacted when I visited with several US government professionals were nice and different from the technical professionals at the organizations which paid me cash money.
Is this important? Yes. I don’t think of Amazon as particularly innovative. When it wanted to do open source search, it hired some people from Lucid Imagination, now Lucid Works. Amazon just did what other Lucene/Solr large-scale users did: Index content and allow people to run queries. Not too innovative in my book. Amazon also industrialized back office and warehouse projects. These are jobs that require finding existing products and consultants, asking them to propose “solutions,” picking one, and getting the workflow working. Again, not particularly difficult when compared to the holographic memory craziness at Bell Labs or the consulting firm’s business of inventing consumer products for companies in the Fortune 500 that would sell and get the consulting firm’s staggering fees paid in cash promptly. In terms of the nuclear engineering work, Amazon was and probably still is, not in the game. Some of the rocket people are, but the majority of the Amazon workers are in retail, digital plumbing, and creating dark pattern interfaces. This is “honorable” work, but it is not invention in the sense of slick Monte Carlo code cranked out by Halliburton’s Dr. Julian Steyn or multi-frequency laser technology for jamming more data through a fiber optic connection.
I read “Amazon Taps Xbox Co-Founder to Lead new Team Developing Breakthrough Consumer Products.” I asked myself, “Is Amazon now in the Bell Labs’ concept space? The write up tries to answer my question, stating:
The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or “zero to one.” Amazon has a checkered history in hardware, with hits including the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and Fire streaming sticks, as well as flops like the Fire Phone, Halo fitness tracker and Glow kids teleconferencing device. Many of the products emerged from Lab126, Amazon’s hardware research and development unit, which is based in Silicon Valley.
Okay, the Fire Phone (maybe Foney) and the Glow thing for kids? Innovative? I suppose. But to achieve success in raw innovation like the firms at which I was an employee? No, Amazon is not in that concept space. Amazon is more comfortable cutting a deal with Elastic instead of “inventing” something like Google’s Transformer or Claude Shannon’s approach to extracting a signal from noise. Amazon sells books and provides an almost clueless interface to managing those on the Kindle eReader.
The write up says (and I believer everything I read on the Internet):
Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to LinkedIn profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group. While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.
Innovation is a risky business. Amazon sells stuff and provides online access with uptime of 98 or 99 percent. It does not “do” innovation. I wrote a book chapter about Amazon’s blockchain patents. What happened to that technology, some of which struck me as promising and sort of novel given the standards for US patents? The answer, based on the information I have seen since I wrote the book chapter, is, “Not much.” In less time, Telegram dumped out dozens of “inventions.” These have ranged from sticking crypto wallets into every Messenger users’ mini app to refining the bot technology to display third-party, off-Telegram Web sites on the fly for about 900 million Messenger users.
Amazon hit a dead end with Alexa and something called Halo.
When an alleged criminal organization operating as an “Airbnb” outfit with no fixed offices and minimal staff can innovate and Amazon with its warehouses cannot, there’s a useful point of differentiation in my mind.
The write up reports:
Earlier this month, Amazon laid off about 100 of the group’s employees. The job cuts included staffers working on Alexa and Amazon Kids, which develops services for children, as well as Lab126, according to public filings and people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. More than 50 employees were laid off at Amazon’s Lab126 facilities in Sunnyvale, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in California.
Okay. Fire up a new unit. Will the approach work? I hope for stakeholders’ and employees’ sake, Amazon hits a home run. But in the back of my mind, innovation is difficult. Quite special people are needed. The correct organizational set up or essentially zero set up is required. Then the odds are usually against innovation, which, if truly novel, evokes resistance. New is threatening.
Can the Bezos bulldozer shift into high gear and do the invention thing? I don’t know but I have some nagging doubts.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2025
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