Amazon from JEDI to Black Eye?
May 5, 2020
Who knows who lies today? Facebook executives remain baffled about user privacy and Cambridge Analytica? Google forgets that it has data about salaries? An Amazon executive explains a reality different from the world in which third-party resellers operate? Bleach, well, not relevant.
“House Panel Demands That Bezos Testify on Whether Amazon Misled Congress” has a catchy subtitle too:
The move marks the greatest escalation to date in the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust probe of Silicon Valley.
The basic idea is to put the driver of the Bezos bulldozer at one of those semi-gloss tables in a room used for hearings and sometimes other things. A group of elected officials will then ask questions, usually prepared by assistants. Each question typically nests within a polemic or a statement designed to get the elected official back in the fund raising game.
Here’s an interesting statement from the write up. The “Nadler” referenced is Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.):
Nadler railed against tech giants like Facebook and Amazon during a private fundraiser in February, warning that the power they possess “cannot be allowed to exist in society.” Nadler added that confronting concentration of power in the U.S. “means breaking up all the large companies,” though he did not specify which firms should be split apart.
The digital monopolies have been doing their thing for a couple of decades. Soon the driver of the Bezos bulldozer will appear and explain what the reality is.
And what is the reality? The Washington Post presents one view. Prime members have another. Third party resellers presumably have their perception as well.
Amazon moved from JEDI to a black eye.
No doubt Mr. Bezos’ view will be interesting. Maybe he will Amazon Chime in?*
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* Chime is Amazon’s video conferencing systems which let’s people work together, simplified.
Stephen E Arnold, May 5, 2020
The Bulldozer and Bray: Amazon and Its People Policies in Action
May 4, 2020
I read “Bye, Amazon.” The author is Tim Bray. Some may remember him as one of the spark plugs of Open Text. He did some nifty visualization work. He did the Google thing until 2014. From 2014 until a couple of days ago he worked at Amazon, the Bezos bulldozer, the online bookstore, and all-around economic engine of Covid America.
The write up states:
I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
When Amazon terminated with prejudice the Amazonians protesting.
Mr. Bray’s reaction was
Snap!
Mr. Bray was upset, went through Amazon channels, and resigned.
He states about the warehouse worker action:
It’s not just workers who are upset. Here are Attorneys-general from 14 states speaking out. Here’s the New York State Attorney-general with more detailed complaints. Here’s Amazon losing in French courts, twice.
On the other hand, he points out:
Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.
In his penultimate paragraph he offers:
At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.
Several observations:
- Mr. Bray has a moral compass. DarkCyber finds that of value.
- Amazon’s “power” has been largely unchecked since the mid 1990s, and only now are actions building like storm clouds on the horizon.
- Mr. Bray was able to continue working for the Google but he could not continue working at Amazon. That’s interesting in itself.
Net net: Will Amazon take steps to deal with what seems to be the Tim Bray situation? Do Prime customers get orders delivered on time? Not if warehouse employees put sand in the Bezos bulldozer’s differential.
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2020
Amazon: Now on a Piracy and Counterfeiting List
April 30, 2020
DarkCyber doubts some sensational headlines, but many times the factoids conveyed are interesting and often amusing. Here’s an example:
Amazon’s Foreign Websites Named in US Piracy and Counterfeiting Report
The story reports that “several of Amazon’s foreign websites have been added to the US trade regulators “Notorious Markets” report on marketplaces known for counterfeiting and piracy concerns.”
DarkCyber assumes that “foreign” means non US centric Web sites. What’s intended is that country specific Amazon Web sites in Canada, France, Germany, India, and the UK purvey counterfeit goods.
The article states:
The USTR [Office of the US Trade Representative] said it had received complaints that seller information displayed by Amazon was often misleading and allegations it was too easy for anyone to sell on Amazon “because Amazon does not sufficiently vet sellers on its platforms.”
Will this have legs? Amazon is challenging some US government procedures with the spin that President Trump is not a fan of the online bookstore.
DarkCyber believes that President Trump conflates the Washington Post (owned by a Bezos entity) with Amazon’s ecommerce business.
Maybe doing more research will allow the Office of the US Trade Representative to determine if the allegation is accurate or a misunderstanding.
Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2020
Amazon: Zooming Toward Google Hangouts?
April 28, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this Thomson Reuters’ story: “Amazon Tests Screening New Merchants for Fraud via Video Calls in Pandemic.” The news story reveals that yes, indeed, Amazon has its own Zoom-type service. What struck DarkCyber as peculiar was that the focus was Covid fraud, not the Amazon video conference service or the Amazon video technology. You can learn about the AWS pay-for-what-you-use service on the Amazon Chime information page. Amazon says:
AWS will offer free use of all Amazon Chime Pro features for online meetings and video conferencing from March 4, 2020 to June 30, 2020 for all customers that start using Amazon Chime for the first time during this period from their AWS account. This does not include PSTN services or charges related to PSTN services, such as Amazon Chime Voice Connector, call-me or meeting dial-in. Customers who are already using Amazon Chime can also contact their AWS account managers to see if they are eligible for credits for Amazon Chime usage during this period.
There are a number of interesting Amazon patents related to video communications. These range from facial recognition to active overlays.
Most of the DarkCyber research time said, “Who knew?” Marketing is not Job One at the online bookstore at this time. Maybe that will change once Mr. Bezos settles into his favorite seat: Driving the Bezos bulldozer.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2020
Amazon and Data Privacy
April 27, 2020
Some people are snoops. I was in Sarande, Albania. The only Internet café open featured a dozen computers and so-so bandwidth. Three young men were busy duplicating US DVDs of motion pictures. I know because I stood next to the group and asked, “What are you doing?”
There was one other person in the storefront. That individual kept peering around the side of his plywood divider to check up on me and what the young men were doing.
Yep, a natural born snoop.
Why’s this relevant?
In a big operation like Amazon, there will be snoops. Some will be following the protein pulses of their DNA and others are doing what someone thought was [a] cool, [b] their job, or [c] no big deal.
I thought about Albania when I read “Amazon Tapped Sellers’ Data to Launch Competing Products.” (Page A1 and A9 in the dead tree edition of the WSJ on April 24, 2020, and at this link online.) My mind works in unusual ways: Albania and Amazon. Hmmm.
I noted:
Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on the company’s platform to develop competing products, a practice at odds with the company’s stated policies.
That strikes me as a statement of fact, not an “allegedly” needed.
Okay, based on the Albania experience, there are people who ask questions directly and there are snoops. But what’s Amazon’s source? I asked the question in Albania, and I directly observed the snoop’s peeking.
The source of the factoid is:
Interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private label business and documents reviewed by the Wall Street journal
How many employees? Who were these people? Why are they no longer working at Amazon? What documents “were reviewed”? Why not include images of these documents?
What’s going on is that a damning story lacks information I could use to verify the factoid.
I think that snoops exist at Amazon. I think that data seeps. I don’t feel comfortable with this type of behavior, but the behavior exists in Albania to Zimbabwe (yep, I have seen some interesting data behaviors there too, including violent acts for the purpose of seizing another person’s farm). A to Z of data snooping I suppose.
Nevertheless, the core of the direct statement about Amazon’s misbehavior rests upon anonymous sources of information.
Sure, the WSJ researchers and journalists reviewed online information about Amazon’s alleged activities. “Experts” were quoted but statements like this come from unnamed sources:
“We would work backwards in terms of the pricing,” said one of the people who used to obtain third party data.
The reliance on anonymous sources opens the door to making up or tweaking a comment to make it better is troubling.
Which is better? Snooping or hiding behind anonymous sources.
Both are bad; neither makes me comfortable.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2020
The JEDI Spat: A Dead End?
April 24, 2020
An online publication called GoCurrent.com published “No Winner Likely In JEDI Court Battle; ‘Just Pull The Plug?’: Greenwalt.”
Neither Amazon nor Microsoft will find the observations in the article acceptable.
The principle for the article is Bill Greenwalt, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. His thinking provides an interesting assessment of the JEDI spat.
Microsoft won the deal. Amazon protested. Now the can has been kicked down the road. The write up asserts:
… Because the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program is suffering so many delays while technology forges ahead, it is being litigated into irrelevance. By effectively dragging out the trial, the latest legal developments only make that worse.
DarkCyber circled this passage as well:
JEDI, likewise, tried to bypass the usual acquisition bureaucracy to get new technology in at the speed of Silicon Valley. But trying to run government procurement more like a business runs afoul of a fundamental problem. No private company lets losing bidders force it to do business with them; the government sometimes does.
The way to have avoided a winner-take-all tussle might have been for a more progressive approach; to wit, a multi-cloud approach. The article states:
Now, the Pentagon insists it won’t split the JEDI contract because it already has too many clouds. The different armed services, defense agencies, and their subunits are all signing different contracts on different terms – over 500 of them…If the Pentagon had gone multi-cloud from the start, “it would have then been, for a change, ahead of the commercial market,” Greenwalt said. “It could have been experimenting with cloud providers and other solutions that manage multiple clouds for the last two years.”
With more legal thrashing ahead, the friction in the procurement processes becomes evident. One can smell the disc brakes screeching.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
When Corporate and Personal Goals Collide: Efficiency over the Individual
April 23, 2020
I read “Covid-19 and the Welcome Collapse of Professionalism.” The write up has a defeatist quality. Consider this passage:
Over the last few weeks, I’ve navigated my own emotional response to the pandemic while attempting to model the leadership I believe is important in times like these: empathetic, decisive, present.
Empathy, decisiveness, and presentness? Does this sound like a young adult trying to explain what he or she wants to do as a parent. There is a sense of loss and longing in the statement quoted above. “Emotional” comes up short. How about the word “psychological”?
The context of the write up is, of course, the crisis of the Great Pandemic. The assumptions in the essay are that the Organization Man’s definition of professionalism is not right for our times. Interesting, just not professional based on my work experience.
What is professional?
Consider Amazon. “Public Plea to AWS: Give Free Credits to Startups Around the World” explains that a successful online bookseller should have “mom” characteristics; that is, empathy, decisiveness, and presentness—just tailored to the needs of the emotional little people.
The article implores:
I am asking AWS to offer us all additional credits based on the last 12 month’s spend. Help us … based on how much business we do with you. Reward your loyal customers. Offering us all, say, the equivalent of one quarter’s standard usage based on the last 12 months of consumption would be a spectacular way you can help us through this difficult time.
These two write ups are interesting. Both are emotional. Both reveal a keen desire to have a parental intervention make everything all better.
The first wants everyone to redefine professionalism, presumably to make work kinder, friendlier, and chock full of goodness. Maybe like a pre-school daycare with really kind staff, milk, and cookies.
The second wants the world’s richest man to give stuff away for free. The argument is that “everybody wins.”
Reality check:
- Work is generally not like day care. People in groups have a tendency to demonstrate human qualities. These include behaviors not in line with empathy, decisiveness, and presentness. Concepts like “I don’t care if your kid is having a birthday party, the report is due tomorrow.” and “I am not sure what to do. You and your team figure it out.” and “I have a plane to catch. Deal with it.”
- The really rich people like to charge people, get money, and increase their cash reserve as a way to keep score. Giving stuff away free is okay if it hooks the person into spending more and forever.
Several observations:
These pleas for change at a time of pandemic are interesting.
Most of the bleats will be white noise.
Change is likely to arrive, but it may not be what those looking for emotional comfort or a benign corporate Santa will deliver.
Net net: Corona pleading may be a new form of Silicon Valley inspired writing. Worth monitoring but with appropriate empathy, decisiveness, and presentness, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2020
Amazon: Big Game Hunting with the Bezos Bulldozer
April 23, 2020
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft rule the gaming industry. Because there is lots of money to be made from games, Google and Amazon want those dollars. Alphabet Inc. launched Google Stadia to mixed reviews, but Tom’s Guide states that, “Amazon’s Project Tempo Could Crush Google Stadia-Here’s Why.”
Google Stadia is a cloud gaming platform and Amazon seeks to rival it with its own called Project Tempo set to arrive in 2021. It was originally going to release in 2020, but COVID-19 delayed it. Not much is known about Project Tempo, except Amazon has the cloud infrastructure and streaming capabilities to outdo Google.
Amazon already has a gaming platform:
“With Project Tempo, Amazon has a chance to succeed where Google has yet to. The company already offers a monthly gaming subscription called Twitch Prime, which comes as part of your Amazon Prime account for $119 per year or $12.99 per month. Twitch Prime provides access to free games, complementary in-game content and free monthly channel subscriptions you can use to support your favorite streamers.
If Amazon were to fold Project Tempo into this service and give Twitch Prime members an instant collection of high-quality games to stream from the cloud, it could offer one heck of a value — and drive even more Amazon Prime subscriptions.”
Google Stadia requires $129 Premium Edition kit and a $10 mostly subscription fee. If Amazon offers better game acmes through their Amazon Prime subscription service, then its would be one heck of a deal for gamers. Gamers want quality over quantity as well as the best and newest technology. Gamers, however, are quick to dismiss rip-offs and if Google Stadia continues in the same vein they will not stand a chance against Project Tempo.
Whitney Grace, April 23, 2020
Google Free Product Listings: A Free-for-All
April 22, 2020
The battle royale is one of the keys to Fortnite’s success. There will be one winner. Google, if the information in the article “In Major Shift, Google Shopping Opens Up to Free Product Listings” is accurate, has declared war on Amazon’s digital catalog of products. The Google-Amazon dust up will be interesting to watch. Amazon plugs along. That’s why I call the company’s tactical approach the Bezos bulldozer. Bulldozers may not be speedy, but the beasties can grind along.
The write up states:
The Google Shopping tab results “will consist primarily of free product listings…”
I noted this comment about the method:
…The free listings will be powered by product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center. Google opened up Merchant Center to all retailers a little over a year ago to start enabling organic product visibility in areas of the search results, including Image search.
More information will become available.
Will Dark Web merchants list their products on Google? Will Google have the acumen to screen product listings? Will banned products find their way on to the service?
These questions will be answered in the near future.
And the bulldozer? I think it will stay the course.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2020
The JEDI Knight Wounds Amazon
April 17, 2020
The Bezos bulldozer has stalled against a bureaucratic stone wall. The overheated engine is idling in outside the Pentagon Metro stop. DarkCyber was informed by a couple of helpful readers that the US government is going Microsoft for the significant Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Project. A representative summary of the review of the contract process appeared in “Pentagon: $10B Cloud Contract That Snubbed Amazon Was Legal.” The write up reported:
“We could not review this matter fully because of the assertion of a ‘presidential communications privilege,’ which resulted in several DOD witnesses being instructed by the DOD Office of General Counsel not to answer our questions about potential communications between White House and DOD officials about JEDI,” the report said.
“As a result, we could not be certain whether there were any White House communications with some DOD officials which may have affected the JEDI procurement,” it said.
“However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DOD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI cloud contract were not pressured … by any DOD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House,” the report said.
Clear enough. Amazon’s bulldozer may have to reverse and head over to other Executive Branch agencies. Copies of the Bezos bulldozer have been spotted in Australia pushing insurance data and in United Arab Emirates moving digital sand for the government.
The problem for Amazon is that displacing PowerPoint is a very, very tough mountain to move. Just ask Google. Palantir’s baby forklift moved some paperwork while forming a relationship with a certain figure of note in Washington, DC.
Maybe Amazon should wear a fashionable Azure T shirt and wear a Dwarven Ring of Power from The Lord of the Rings available on Etsy?
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2020
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