Just as a random aside, Alberto Santos-Dumont would probably agree with that sentiment ^_^
Or someone else would have invented the light bulb? Or calculus? Or television?
Bezos deserves some of the credit, more of it than any other individual, but that doesn’t make him nobility, it doesn’t mean his political opinions should carry more weight that other people’s and it doesn’t mean he’s any better in realms outside the one he succeeded in. In fact, it doesn’t even mean he’s the best at his own field now (compared to the best of the best who learned from his work 20 years ago), as history has repeatedly shown. The tendency to go from respecting someone’s ideas to respecting their authority is one we have to actively fight against in pretty much every field.
Man, just imagine what the Liebniz-Newton fight would have been like in modern times. It was already acrimonious enough without the ability to unleash the hordes against proponents of your opposite.
Bit of a kerfuffle on the Mayor Pete beat this morning. He’s been doing bus tours of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he’s given press unlimited, unfettered access. Guess he did a sit-down interview with the LA Times, who asked him about the differences between himself and Biden. Pete stated that he wasn’t as interested in going “back” as Biden was, but finding a new place to go forward, and quoted Hizzoner as saying “I think the failures of the Obama Administration help explain how we got to the Trump period.”
Which, led to pile-ons even from folks who typically are critics of the Obama administration. So Mayor Pete, in his genteel midwestern way, suggested the LA Times reporter check his tape again on that quote. And sure enough, what Pete said was that the old version of “normal” wasn’t very good for people in his part of the country either, and: “My message is not about going back to where we were, getting back to normal…I think the failures of the old normal help explain how we got to the Trump period.”
And then they released their own tape to prove it.
And so the LA Times issued a retraction. Other campaigns issued their own “Ooops, sorry Pete” statements, and there you go.
Always have your own tape running when someone is interviewing you if you’re a politician.
A tech company thread would be fine, although I think we have plenty of other threads to cover the various topics. Case in point, for the billionaire discussion:
Back on the topic of the election, while this isn’t actually the Presidential race, I feel like it’s related. Do we have a general 2020 election thread?
Heh, one of my favorite parts of “A Brief History Of Time” is the section about Newton, which if I recall opens with “Issac Newton was not a nice man.” It goes on to describe how Newton basically made it his personal crusade to utterly destroy Liebniz.
Yup.
If Jeff Bezos had been run over by a bus when he was ten years old, the world in 2019 would be … almost exactly the same as it is now.
Sure, the name of the ginormous online retail giant would be different. And sure, it might have taken three or four more years for an effective retail giant to emerge. But it would have happened, because it’s a very obvious idea and many, many, many, many people were working on it in the late 90s.
It’s possible no one individual could have done it better than Bezos … but this is a very, very different thing than saying no one could have done it at all.
…That is indeed exactly how most invention works. Especially in cases like the airplane, where hundreds of people all over the world were busily pursuing the same widely-known, hot idea at the same time.
Same with the incandescent light bulb, or the telephone, or the creation of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. In all those cases tech had evolved to a point where people in the know realized that a very juicy, very valuable fruit lay just beyond their reach, triggering a race to figure out the last steps needed to make a widely-known blockbuster idea commercially viable.
The idea that Bezos, the Wright brothers, Edison, Bell or Haber were the only possible people who could have made their discoveries is absurd, when looking at the broader historical picture. It’s like believing that if the frontrunner in a marathon sprains his ankle and goes down, the rest of the hundreds of runners disappear and the race is cancelled. Not at all: the race goes on and a winner is eventually declared, just a bit later.
So why do we insist in believing that people like Bezos are unique, irreplaceable and divinely gifted? Part of it is the uniquely American business religion which holds that wealth is the only sure sign of divine favor - if Bezos has all that money, clearly God chose him to have it; part of it is that rich people spend a whole lot on marketing designed to convince the world that they’re geniuses, regardless of their actual talents (see Donald J. Trump, widely acknowledged to be master of the art of the deal until we got to examine him up close and in detail.)
But a lot of it is that if you’re a serf, you want to believe that the master is a golden god with magic powers. That’s much more comforting than knowing you’re owned by some slightly-above-average guy who was simply in the right place at the right time, and one step quicker than the other runners.
Then why didn’t any of those people who had FAR more resources available to them do this “very obvious idea”? Why didn’t any of the already existing tech giants do it? Or any of the existing retail giants?
The assumption that everything that happens just happens independently from actual individual people, is utterly without merit.
How did this one guy, working out of his garage, beat them all?
Sounds like a mix of rationalizing the way our society as to avoid any deep introspection (and possibly guilt) and a bit of good old fashion puritanical predetermination that even the most ardent atheists seems to hold on to.
Let’s face, for a large enough group of people, society works. So, no need to rock the boat (in the opinion of the people who are doing okay). Besides, change might be bad.
Someone tell Timex that they did.
Didn’t we move this discussion elsewhere? Anyway, 1994 Bezos seems to have agreed with that thought, at least how I read it.
This is one of those areas that I don’t think any evidence will make a difference. Sometimes, we have areas that are such a big part of our views that changing them would be painful, almost physical so.
I am sure I have a few areas, like my belief in government and government employees (since so many members of my family are or were federal employees, as are a few of my friends).
There’s no doubt that inertia is a huge factor and these entrepreneur types tend to shake up established systems.
Look at cell phones - there’s a very good chance, almost a certainty, that at best we’d be looking at something like a Palm Pilot + stick phone, since nobody had any incentive to change. A great example of how this works right now is the PC industry - sure the specs and standards change but apparently people are just as happy to buy giant ATX cases and fill them with ATX motherboards and compatible parts, all of which are effectively the same form factor as they were 20, almost 30 years ago. There’s not yet been an innovation dramatic enough to shake up the industrial inertia in personal computers, and consumers just follow along with the industrial output, because they don’t’ really know what could be different when that different thing doesn’t exist, and Taiwanese companies just already have all the production lines to make ATX and similar stuff, and they stamp them out and the ball keeps on rolling.
They sell candy bar stick phones now as a retro kitch time management lifehack, by contrast.
Amazon is closest to Valve - both came up with a distribution model for a smaller thing (their own PC games, books for Amazon) and both discovered a niche they could fill - PC games distribution, everything and the kitchen sink distribution.
Yet there’s also an element of being at the right place and the right time. Steam wouldn’t really have work without broadband companies laying the groundwork for cheap, consumer level broadband (in this way, much like Netflix switched from DVDs to streaming), and Amazon, despite whatever supply chain madness it pioneered, would never have been Amazon without an already first class shipping system in FedEx and UPS, who were both eager and quite adept at picking up and handling all the extra freight. Someone who came up with the idea of Steam or Amazon.com 30 years ago would have been stillborn, because the infrastructure needed to make those ideas work didn’t exist.
What Amazon has done is nothing special, they were simply the right company at the right time. There is similarly nothing special about Alibaba, the company that dominates Asia. In Eastern Europe, ie. Romania or Bulgaria, the same market is dominated by Naspers, a South African company. Is Jacobus Petrus “Koos” Bekker, Naspers’ billionaire chariman, a mini-Bezos ecommerce genius that specialized in Eastern Europe? Nope, right company, right time, that is all it takes.
Actually, with the lack of infrastructure, the South African one is a bit more impress than Amazon.
Saying that there’s nothing special about the first to do something, because others later copied them, is not a logically sound position.
Or hey, you guys are all millionaires right? You all invested in Amazon when it made it’s IPO? Because, I mean, the success of their idea was so obvious, right? You guys all bought in for $1.75?
Congrats, guys.
Regardless, if we want to keep taking about this, which is certainly interesting to me, someone should make a thread about the tech companies, or Amazon specifically, or how entrepreneurship is just a scam done by lucky people.
They didn’t just copy Amazon though. And they had to work in a continent that had many areas that lack basic highways or even an accurate postal system.
It was a shit ton more work, compared to the US, where we have highways, internet, a great postal system and functional infrastructures. All Bezos did was corner the market on mailing out books and them scale up. He got lucky that the US government took care of most of his problems for him.