• Home
• About
• Writers
• Wizards Index
• Landscape
• Fraud
• Wanna Be Like Larry?

 Subscribe

Amazon: A Forest of Feral Creatures Hawking Stuff

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

In the late 1990s, a professional acquaintance named Jeff Pemberton told me about his interaction with Jeff Bezos, a Wall Street wolf. Jeff’s comments to me were positive. My recollection of Jeff’s observation is that Amazon would revolutionize online commerce.

Jeff was correct. I am not sure if Amazon turned out exactly as Jeff’s enthusiastic description of the early days of the Bezos bulldozer suggested. Bulldozers are not, by design, precision instruments. One removes obstructions, smashes down anything sticking up, and coverts a nice green patch into a warehouse ready plot.

Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.

The Los Angeles Times suggests that the Bezos bulldozer has provided a suitable modern jungle for criminals of different types. “Shadow Bribery Market Inside Amazon Preys on Desperate Sellers” says:

She [a shadowy entity] could bribe an Amazon employee to help him retrieve $90,000 in funds that the e-commerce giant had frozen after suspending him over an alleged violation of review policy.

Wait. Who is the bad actor? Is it Amazon the company allegedly withholding an online merchant’s funds? Is it the shadowy entry who is brokering sensitive information? Is it the Amazon employee who can for cash fiddle the ecommerce system?

Now that’s an interesting sequence of questions about Amazon, the company that along with Walmart has devasted traditional retail operations in most of the United States. That’s quite an achievement in my opinion. There are probably case studies from estimable academic institutions like the Harvard Business School to Moscow’s Skolkovo praising the genius that impressed Jeff Pemberton. (Oh, for those of you who don’t know Mr. Pemberton, he was the first executive at the New York Times charged with putting the Gray Lady’s content online. He failed big time. He then created a company that specialized in publishing journals and holding conferences focused on online information. Sadly Mr. Bezos fooled him too.)

The LA Times reminds me:

In 2020, federal prosecutors exposed an international bribery scheme involving Amazon sellers and employees. The ring allegedly extracted about $100 million in unfair advantages by bribing Amazon employees in Asia to help them sell more products and sabotage their competitors. Five people in the U.S. were convicted and received jail terms or probation. Last year, law enforcement officials in India began investigating more than 20 former Amazon employees suspected of accepting bribes from trucking companies in exchange for routes, according to The Times of India.

I must admit that I don’t think too much about Amazon as a jungle of systemic criminal behavior. However, one could draw that conclusion if these examples of extortion and fraud are on the money so to speak. The write up also explains some of Amazon’s internal procedures that strike me as  methods designed to deny and deflect.

Several observations appear to be warranted:

1. In the US consumer protection seems to be falling short of the market
2. Cyber fraud investigators can find that “he said, she said” cases are dead ends and black holes for available resources
3. Insider criminal behavior, despite the statements by some of the marketing oriented cyber security firms, remain one of the most problematic methods permitting crime to take root, adapt, and flourish in large organizations.

Net net: Amazon is a jungle. When walking its paths, caution is necessary.

Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2026

Amazon and Its Approach to Trust: A Unique Method

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

I spotted an article in PC Mag. As a former beaver at the Damn Ziff in Manhattan, today’s PC Mag is different from the PC Magazine I knew. Despite the changes, “Amazon MGM Studios Dumps Upcoming OpenAI Movie” conveyed some allegedly actual factual information I found interesting.

Fresh in my mind was Amazon’s unclear role in getting its AI pal Anthropic banned. I interpreted the move as a the BAIT (big AI tech) company’s ratting out someone from a fourth grade class for bringing an Al Fakher hookah endorsed by Snoop Dogg to school for a show and tell. I think it is tough to hide a hookah in a fourth grade classroom, so the tattling does not accomplish much except publicity. 

Now the delightful Amazon has inked a deal (allegedly) with OpenAI, a competitor to Anthropic. I assume Anthropic was ecstatic about Amazon’s murky role in the US government’s decision to ban certain Anthropic technology. This action, of course, would be ignored by Chinese AI developers who would never ever consider beefing up their AI models to match or exceed the bug sniffing capability of Anthropic’s Glasswing/Mythos/Fumble/whatever service. Perish that thought.

What’s clear is that Amazon finds OpenAI and its exemplary leader ideal for Amazon’s smart software craving. That’s okay. Partners in AI come and go more quickly than Google and Meta AI wizards job hop or surf for money on Sand Hill Road.

Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough.

The write up points out:

An upcoming movie based on the life of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been dropped by Amazon’s MGM Studios.

If this is indeed true, Amazon is adding another trophy to its AI championship belt. Last months, big gold emblem spelled out Anthropic. Now the big gold emblem says, “OpenAI.” The PC Mag story adds:

The news comes as Amazon became one of the ChatGPT firm’s biggest investors earlier this year. In February, Amazon announced it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the following months, pending certain conditions. The deal would see the tech giants partner on several projects, including Amazon Web Services becoming the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, one of its enterprise offerings.

I can imagine the thrill the people behind the alleged movie about Sam AI man experienced when the news began circulating.

I have a hypothesis about this murky affair, and it has several parts.

First, how do you break up or find a reason that sounds really good to walk away from a certain technology, person, or company? Why not jump on the bandwagon that blasts this message from loud speakers: “Anthropic’s code will raid on your next golf outing and probably your morning walk… forever.”

Second, how do you show your new AI partner that you love, respect, and honor that software? My thought is that one chokes off a movie that may put your new BFF in a less than flattering light.

Third, how do you avoid complex legal issues? Go back to the first point. The decision is little more than a way to allow a nearly completed film to find a better “production” partner. I assume that landing another outfit is trivial. However, if it is like the Hollywood I encountered when I did a teeny tiny project for a B movie mogul, Luca Guadagnino, the director will be working the phones 24×7.

Is my hypothesis reality? Of course not. Amazon would not play the  national security card, make nice with Sam Altman, and effectively delay or doom a film about @sama.

Coincidences do happen. Does the PC Mag story inspire trust in Amazon. It sure does for me.

Stephen E Arnold, June 22, 2026

Insurance: A Data Center Issue of Some Financial Import

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

There is nothing like a write up about insurance to make one’s endorphins spike. I read an article on Moneywise titled something like “Amazon Lost $150 Million When Drones Hit Its Gulf-State Data Centers Amid the Iran War — And Insurance Won’t Cover It.”

I wanted to show shooting fish (data centers) in a barrel. But guard rails are in place to make sure I don’t damage the sensibilities of those humans and bots reading my blog posts. So, you get a person fishing for a big catch in a small fish bowl. I love AI generated illustrations. Yes, Venice.ai. Just good enough like those insurance policies with small typography.

The article reported on April 24, 2026:

The AWS facilities weren’t random targets. As geopolitical tensions escalate, data centers — the backbone of cloud computing, AI and digital services — are increasingly viewed as strategic infrastructure. They underpin communications, logistics, payments and military planning …

War is one of those things for which insurance companies are thrilled to process claims. No big surprise. When bad weather trashes an insured house, those insurance companies often huddle with their lawyers and actuaries to figure out how to keep whatever cash they have on hand in their piggy bank.

The cited article added:

For tech giants, that can mean hundreds of millions of dollars. For smaller businesses that rely on cloud infrastructure, it can mean lost revenue during outages, limited compensation for disruptions or higher insurance premiums going forward.

I noted this passage and the big number in it:

Amazon’s reported $150-million hit is a warning shot: even the world’s largest companies aren’t insulated from geopolitical risk, and neither are the systems consumers depend on.

With regard to Amazon, overheating at some of the firm’s data centers surfaced as a minor problem. Heat, however, is a known issue. The overheating creates an opportunity to ask a couple of questions: Was the engineering of the cooling systems subject to some efficiency decisions that make overheating more likely, not a non-issue? Were decisions made with regard to the robustness of the cooling infrastructure so that if one system were stressed another “system saver” subsystem kicked in?

Now the implication of the Moneywise story is that Amazon’s data centers located in or near a war zone were not hardened. These data centers are now subject to targeting by forces hostile to Amazon or the country in which the data centers are located.

Let’s consider Amazon’s options:

1. Harden existing data centers as part of the service restoration process. The question is, “How much will post construction and post remediation cost?” My thought is that the costs could be substantial.
2. Build more robustly engineered and hardened data centers elsewhere. The cost of this rather dramatic shift means that Amazon loses good will in the countries on the periphery of the war zone with no guarantee these relocated facilities would not be targeted with additional strikes to emphasize the vulnerability of very large flat roofed, exposed structures.
3. Repair existing damaged data centers and absorb the costs of remediation if additional strikes hit home.

I have not seen an analysis of the vulnerabilities of other US-linked data centers in the war zone. With no resolution of the US-Iran conflict in hand, data centers make attractive targets. Replacement infrastructure is simply not a matter of waiting for a two-day delivery via DHL. The key point is that traditional design and engineering of data centers makes them obvious targets to make clear the vulnerability of MBA-type assumptions. Is Amazon alone? Nope. Other US firms are in the same predicament.

Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2026

Amazon Has Lost Control of Its Messaging

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

Amazon confuses me. I read “Amazon Convenes Deep Dive Internal Meeting to Address Outages.” The story reports that the leadership of the online bookstore held a meeting on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, “to discuss a string of recent site outages, including one tied to AI-assisted coding errors.” The Versant-tinged write up said, “Production changes were partly to blame for the issues, but the reference to GenAI was subsequently deleted.” I think this means that the dreams of AI doing reliable coding were waking some people up to the reality of “good enough” smart software. Even if the report is wonky, the message strikes me as, “Yep, AI code might have some downsides.”

A leader from the leadership team learns from smart software that “good enough” is the benchmark. Yeah, real life is different. Thanks, Venice.ai. Definitely just good enough.

Then I read “Amazon Is Determined to Use AI for Everything – Even When It Slows Down Work.” That write up says:

More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing.

Okay, that is a bit of negativity about Amazon’s business vision. More AI, fewer employees — Makes sense to me, stakeholders, and bean counters.

Plus, my newsfeed delivered this gem to me: “FCC Chair Criticizes Slow Pace of Amazon Satellite Launches.” I mostly believe this write up because it comes from the trust outfit Thomson Reuters. I note that Amazon does not want its competitor (Elon Musk, yep, the X.com and Grok fellow) to launch a million satellites. Good idea, but Mr. Musk has about 10,000 or so in orbit. Adding another 990,000 is unlikely to happen in the next few months. Nevertheless, Amazon is grousing and comes off as being grumpy and laggards in orbiting clutter in my opinion.

What caught my dinobaby mind is that these stories support my contention that Amazon’s messaging its PR or public relations is either doing a great job keeping Amazon in the news or struggling to neutralize high profile negativism about the company, its management, and its AI.

The fact that Amazon is whiffing in AI is bad. The fact that employees work in fear is bad. The grousing about Mr. Tesla is bad. The criticism of Amazon’s behavior by the US government is bad. When I add up the “bads”, the score is not too sporty.

Several observations are warranted:

1. Amazon is in the category of “if we build it, they will come.” What’s been delivered is online outages and a signal that management is discovering it that what arrives with AI is problems.
2. The public relations department at Amazon may need to up its game. Perhaps that unit could watch some AI SEO videos and figure out how to get some TikTok-type influencers to explain that Amazon is doing a bang up job. (What if Amazon’s PR professionals are using AI, and these Negative Nancy stories are further proof of some downsides in the rush to do “good enough” PR?)
3. Management or leadership at Amazon seems to be making decisions that are not producing obvious wins. In fact, the decisions of the Carpetland crowd are the cause of the negative flows. On the other hand, maybe Amazon’s senior officers are using AI, and we are seeing the quality of the output in real news time?

Net net: Amazon does not have a PR problem. It has a management problem much more serious than a Perplexity shopping bot.

Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2026

Amazon: Employee Innovation the Bezos Bulldozer Way

In 2025, Amazon instituted a cute trick to monitor those who were returning to the office or RTO to work and learn if they were RIFed. Amazon has implemented a new tool to track its employees in a manner that would make Big Brother smile. Business Insider has the scoop on employee tracking in the article, “Amazon Gives Managers A New Way To Spot Employees Who Aren’t Spending Enough Time In The Office.”

The new monitoring policy tracks how often employees come to the office, how long they stay, and the locations where they work. There are there types of Amazon employees this tracking system will affect:

“The system flags three kinds of employees: “Low-Time Badgers,” defined as employees whose weekly median time in the office is less than four hours per day, averaged over a rolling eight-week period; “Zero Badgers,” who don’t badge into any Amazon building during that span; and “Unassigned Building Badgers,” who badge into a building other than the one they’re assigned to over half the time.”

Amazon put the monitoring system in place because employees weren’t abiding by the RTO. Now everyone needs to suffer under the watchful of Big Bezos Bulldozer.

Amazon just upgraded its “coffee badging” that required teams to be in office for a minimum of two to six hours. Some employees (soon to learn that each could find their future elsewhere) said coffee badging was a high school method. Amazon claims its tracking system is an effort to encourage collaboration among its employees. The company claims that “working in-office is important to our culture…”.

Here’s a question for you. Will Amazon just chip its employees like dogs. The robots would have another signal so a dawdler would not come face to face with a smart machine. Hook in an agent, and Amazon will know where every employee is and what he or she is allegedly doing every minute of every day. That sounds efficient. We know Amazon has great confidence in AI. A recent outage allegedly caused by a “good enough” AI system was traced to a human. Let’s chip that one for sure.

Whitney Grace, February 27, 2026

AI and Management: Look for Lists and Save Time

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

How does a company figure out whom to terminate? [a] Ask around. [b] Consult “objective” performance reviews. [c] Examine a sales professionals booked deal? [d] Look for a petition signed by employees unhappy with company policies? The answer is at the end of this short post.

A human resources professional has figured out which employees are at the top of the reduction in force task. Thanks Venice.ai. How many graphic artists did you annoy today?

I read “More Than 1,000 Amazon Employees Sign Open Letter Warning the Company’s AI Will Do Staggering Damage to Democracy, Our Jobs, and the Earth .”* The write up states:

The letter was published last week with signatures from over 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, from Whole Foods cashiers to IT support technicians. It’s a fraction of Amazon’s workforce, which amounts to about 1.53 million, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release. In it, employees claim the company is “casting aside its climate goals to build AI,” forcing them to use the tech while working toward cutting its workforce in favor of AI investments, and helping to build “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”

Okay, grousing employees. Signatures. Amazon AI. Hmm. I wonder if some of that old time cross correlation will highlight these individuals and their “close” connections in the company. Who are the managers of these individuals? Are the signers and their close connections linked by other factors; for example a manager? What if a manager has a disproportionate number of grousers? These are made up questions in a purely hypothetical scenario. But they crossed my mind

Do you think someone in Amazon leadership might think along similar lines?

The write up says:

Amazon announced in October it would cut around 14,000 corporate jobs, about 4% of its 350,000-person corporate workforce, as part of a broader AI-driven restructuring. Total corporate cuts could reach up to 30,000 jobs, which would be the company’s single biggest reduction ever, Reuters reported a day prior to Amazon’s announcement.

My reaction was, “Just 1,000 employees signed the grousing letter?” The rule of thumb in a company with pretty good in-person customer support had a truism, “One complaint means 100 people are annoyed just too lazy to call us.” I wonder if this rule of thumb would apply to an estimable firm like Amazon. It only took me 30 minutes to get a refund for the prone to burn or explode mobile phone battery. Pretty swift, but not exactly the type of customer services that company at which I worked responded.

The write up concludes with a quote from a person in carpetland at Amazon:

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo.

I like the royal “we” or the parental “we.” I don’t think it is the in the trenches we, but that is my personal opinion. I like the emphasis on faster and innovation. That move fast and break things is just an outstanding approach to dealing with complex problems.

Ah, Amazon, why does my Kindle iPad app no longer work when I don’t have an Internet connection? You are definitely innovating.

And the correct answer to the multiple choice test? [d] Names on a list. Just sayin’.

———————

* This is one of those wonky Yahoo news urls. If it doesn’t work, don’t hassle me. Speak with that well managed outfit Yahoo, not someone who is 81 and not well managed.

Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2025

Amazon and its Imperative to Dump Human Workers

This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Everyone loves Amazon. The local merchants thank Amazon for allowing them to find their future elsewhere. The people and companies dependent on Amazon Web Services rejoiced when the AWS system failed and created an opportunity to do some troubleshooting and vendor shopping. The customer (me) who received a pair of ladies underwear instead of an AMD Ryzen 5750X. I enjoyed being the butt of jokes about my red, see through microprocessor. Was I happy!

Mice discuss Amazon’s elimination of expensive humanoids. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.

However, I read “Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots.” My reaction was that some employees and people in the Amazon job pipeline were not thrilled to learn that Amazon allegedly will dump humans and embrace robots. What a great idea. No health care! No paid leave! No grousing about work rules! No medical costs! No desks! Just silent, efficient, depreciable machines. Of course there will be smart software. What could go wrong? Whoops. Wrong question after taking out an estimated one third of the Internet for a day. How about this question, “Will the stakeholders be happy?” There you go.

The write up cranked out by the Gray Lady reports from confidential documents and other sources says:

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

Why is Amazon dumping humans? The NYT turns to that institution that found Jeffrey Epstein a font of inspiration. I read this statement in the cited article:

“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.” If the plans pan out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

Ah, save money. Keep more money for stakeholders. Who knew? Who could have foreseen this motivation?

What jobs will Amazon provide to humans? Obviously leadership will keep leadership jobs. In my decades of professional work experience, I have never met a CEO who really believes anyone else can do his or her job. Well, the NYT has an answer about what humans will do at Amazon; to wit:

Amazon has said it has a million robots at work around the globe, and it believes the humans who take care of them will be the jobs of the future. Both hourly workers and managers will need to know more about engineering and robotics as Amazon’s facilities operate more like advanced factories.

I wish to close this essay with several observations:

1. Much of the information in the write up come from company documents. I am not comfortable with the use of this type of information. It strikes me as a short cut, a bit like Google or self-made expert saying, “See what I did!”
2. Many words were used to get one message across: Robots and by extension smart software will put people out of work. Basic income time, right? Why not say that?
3. The reason wants to dump people is easy to summarize: Humans are expensive. Cut humans, costs drop (in theory). But are there social costs? Sure, but why dwell on those.

Net net: Sigh. Did anyone reviewing this story note the Amazon online collapse? Perhaps there is a relationship between cost cutting at Amazon and the company’s stability?

Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2025

Amazon AWS: Two Pizza Team Engineering Delivers Indigestion to Lots of People

No smart software. Just a dumb and quite old dinobaby.

Years ago an investment bank asked me to write a report about Amazon’s technical infrastructure. I had visited Amazon as part of a US government entity. Along with four colleagues from different agencies, I had an opportunity to ask about how Amazon’s infrastructure could be used as an online services platform. I did not get an answer, just marketing talk. One of the phrases stuck with me; to wit, “We use two pizza teams.”

The idea is that no technical project can involve more developers than two pizzas can feed. I was not sure if this was brilliant, smart assery, or an admission that Amazon was a “good enough” engineering organization.

I had a couple of other Amazon projects after that big tech study. One was to analyze Amazon’s patents for blockchain. Let me tell you. Those Amazon engineers were into cross chain methods and a number of dizzying engineering innovations. Where did that blockchain stuff go? To tell the truth, I don’t have many Amazon blockchain items lighting up my radar. Then I did a report for a law enforcement group interested in Amazon’s drone demonstration in Australia. The idea was that Amazon’s drone had image recognition. The demo showed the drone spotting a shark heading toward swimmers. The alert was sounded and the shark had to go find another lunch spot. What happened to that? I have no idea. Then … oh, well, you get the idea.

Amazon does technology which seems to be  okay with leasing Kindle books and allowing third party resellers to push polo shirts. The Ring thing, the Alexa gizmo, and other Amazon initiatives like its mobile phone were not hitting home runs.

I read “Widespread Internet Outage Reported As Amazon Web Services Works on Issue.” [This is a Microsoft link. If it goes dead, don’t call me. Give Copilot a whirl.] Okay, order those pizzas. The write up reports:

The Amazon cloud computing company, which supports wide swaths of the publicly available internet, issued an update Monday just after 3 p.m. ET saying that the company continues to “observe recovery across all AWS services.” “We are in the process of validating a fix,” AWS added, referring to a specific problem set off by the connectivity issue announced shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time.

Okay, that’s 12 hours and counting.

I want to point out that the two-pizza approach to engineering is cute. The reality is that AWS is vulnerable. The outage may be a result of engineering flubs. You are familiar with those. The company says, “An intern entered a invalid command.” The outage may be a result of Amazon’s giant and almost unmanageable archipelago of servers, services, software, and systems was hacked by a bad actor. Maybe it was one of those 1,000 bad actors who took out Microsoft a couple of years ago? Maybe it was a customer who grew frustrated with inexplicable fees and charges? Maybe it was a problem caused by an upstream or downstream vendor? One thing is sure: It will take more than a two pizza team to remediate and prevent the failure from happening again.

In that first report for the California money guys, I made one point: The AWS system will fail and no one will know exactly what went wrong.

Two pizza engineering is a Groucho Marx type of quip.  Now we know what one gets: Digital food poisoning.

Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2025 at 530 pm US Eastern

Will Amazon Become the Bell Labs of Consumer Products?

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

Amazon Takes the First Step Toward Moby Dickdom

No AI. Just a dinobaby sharing an observation about younger managers and their innocence.

This Engadget article does not predict the future. “Amazon Will Use AI to Generate Recaps for Book Series on the Kindle” reports:

Amazon’s new feature could make it easier to get into the latest release in a series, especially if it’s been some time since you’ve read the previous books. The new Recaps feature is part of the latest software update for the Kindle, and the company compares it to “Previously on…” segments you can watch for TV shows. Amazon announced Recaps in a blog post, where it said that you can get access to it once you receive the software update over the air or after you download and install it from Amazon’s website. Amazon didn’t talk about the technology behind the feature in its post, but a spokesperson has confirmed to TechCrunch that the recaps will be AI generated.

You may know a person who majored in American or English literature. Here’s a question you could pose:

Do those novels by a successful author follow a pattern; that is, repeatable elements and a formula?

My hunch is that authors who have written a series of books have a recipe. The idea is, “If it makes money, do it again.” In the event that you could ask Nora Roberts or commune with Billy Shakespeare, did their publishers ask, “Could you produce another one of those for us? We have a new advance policy.” When my Internet 2000: The Path to the Total Network made money in 1994, I used the approach, tone, and research method for my subsequent monographs. Why? People paid to read or flip through the collected information presented my way. I admit I that combined luck, what I learned at a blue chip consulting firm, and inputs from people who had written successful non-fiction “reports.” My new monograph — The Telegram Labyrinth — follows this blueprint. Just ask my son, and he will say, “My dad has a template and fills in the blanks.”

If a dinobaby can do it, what about flawed smart software?

Chase down a person who teaches creative writing, preferably in a pastoral setting. Ask that person, “Do successful authors of series follow a pattern?”

Here’s what I think is likely to happen at Amazon. Remember. I have zero knowledge about the inner workings of the Bezos bulldozer. I inhale its fumes like many other people. Also, Engadget doesn’t get near this idea. This is a dinobaby opinion.

Amazon will train its smart software to write summaries. Then someone at Amazon will ask the smart software to generate a 5,000 word short story in the style of Nora Roberts or some other money spinner. If the story is okay, then the Amazonian with a desire to shift gears says, “Can you take this short story and expand it to a 200,000 word novel, using the patterns, motifs, and rhetorical techniques of the series of novels by Nora, Mark, or whoever.

Guess what?

Amazon now has an “original” novel which can be marketed as an Amazon test, a special to honor whomever, or experiment. If Prime members or the curious click a lot, that Amazon employee has a new business to propose to the big bulldozer driver.

How likely is this scenario? My instinct is that there is a 99 percent probability that an individual at Amazon or the firm from which Amazon is licensing its smart software has or will do this.

How likely is it that Amazon will sell these books to the specific audience known to consume the confections of Nora and Mark or whoever? I think the likelihood is close to 80 percent. The barriers are:

1. Bad optics among publishers, many of which are not pals of fume spouting bulldozers in the few remaining bookstores
2. Legal issues because both publishers and authors will grouse and take legal action. The method mostly worked when Google was scanning everything from timetables of 19th century trains in England to books just unwrapped for the romance novel crowd
3. Management disorganization. Yep, Amazon is suffering the organization dysfunction syndrome just like other technology marvels
4. The outputs lack the human touch. The project gets put on ice until OpenAI, Anthropic, or whatever comes along and does a better job and probably for fewer computing resources which means more profit.

What’s important is that this first step is now public and underway.

Engadget says, “Use it at your own risk.” Whose risk may I ask?

Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2025

Next Page »

• 

• Search the site

•  

  Subscribe to Beyond Search

  • 
  • 
   
  • 
   
  
  Feature archive
  News archive
   
  
  
  Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.

• Categories

  • 3D-Printing
  • Acquisition
  • Advertising
  • Aggregation
  • AI
  • Alexa
  • algorithms
  • Amazon
  • Amazonia
  • Analytics
  • Appliance
  • Applications
  • Audio
  • Augmented Reality
  • Big data
  • Bing
  • Bitcoin
  • Bitext
  • Book review
  • Business intelligence
  • Business process
  • Business strategy
  • Censorship
  • Cloud computing
  • Company Profile
  • Conferences
  • Connectors
  • Consulting
  • Consumer
  • Content processing
  • Copyright
  • Corporate Concerns
  • Cost
  • Crawl
  • Crowdfunding
  • cryptocurrency
  • Customer support
  • Cyber OSINT
  • cybercrime
  • cybersecurity
  • Dark Web
  • DarkCyber
  • Data
  • Data mining
  • Database
  • Deepfakes
  • Digital Assistant
  • Digital Library
  • E2EE
  • ECommerce
  • EDiscovery
  • Editorial opinion
  • Education
  • Emoticons
  • Employment
  • Enterprise
  • Enterprise search
  • Entity extraction
  • Ethics
  • Facebook
  • Faceted search
  • Factualities
  • Feature
  • Federated search
  • Financial
  • Google
  • Governance
  • Government
  • Hackers
  • healthcare
  • IBM Watson
  • Image search
  • Indexing
  • Infrastructure
  • Innovation
  • Integration
  • intelware
  • Interface
  • Internet
  • Interview
  • Investment
  • law enforcement
  • Legal matters
  • Library automation
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • Mathematics
  • Metadata
  • Microsoft
  • Mobile
  • Natural language processing
  • News
  • NGIA
  • Online (general)
  • Open Access
  • Open source
  • OSINT
  • Osint Radar
  • Overflight
  • Palantir
  • Patents
  • Personnel
  • Podcast
  • Policeware
  • Portals
  • Predictive coding
  • Privacy
  • Profile
  • Publishing
  • Quotation
  • Real time search
  • Reference tool
  • Rich media
  • Robot Writer
  • Search
  • Search enabled applications
  • search engine
  • Search quality
  • Security
  • Semantic
  • Sentiment analysis
  • SEO
  • SharePoint
  • Short Honks
  • Smart Technology
  • Social
  • Social Media
  • software
  • Statistics
  • Taxonomy
  • Technology
  • Telegram
  • Text analytics
  • Text processing
  • Tools
  • Tor
  • Training
  • Translation
  • Twitter
  • Uncategorized
  • Unstructured Data
  • User experience
  • User Interface
  • Vertical search
  • Video
  • visualization
  • Voice search
  • Voice technology
  • Web 3
  • Web Services
  • Webinar
  • Windows
  • Work flow
  • XML
  • Yahoo

• Archives

  Archives Select Month August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 November 5

• Recent Posts

  • Word Worms Fly with a Trusted, Reliable, Capable, and Secure Copilot
  • AI Content in Web Search Results: Your Fault and Controlling Content Is Just Too Hard
  • Big AI Tech and Books: The Dumpster Full of Disassembled Books Is Now a Cultural Icon
  • Anthropic: Three Times Better, Three Times Worse, or Three Times the PR?
  • Naked Something, Elon Musk, and Minnesota

• Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org