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Amazon CTO Rips Blogging Authors a New One

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Mar 31, 2006 12:12 AM
from the no-holds-barred dept.
The Internet Editorial
theodp writes "Following what was characterized as rude treatment of invited guests in a confrontation at Amazon HQ, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels turned to his personal blog to give author Shel Israel a public scolding for suggesting Amazon doesn't 'get' blogging (Amazon's blogging innovations include 'faux' personal blogs and patent-pending plogs). Vogels went on to voice concerns on Israel's blog that blogging could be too distracting for Amazon employees - think the self-proclaimed guy-with-guts challenged CEO Jeff Bezos about the distractions of his space exploration efforts?"
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  • Heh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by popeyethesailor (325796) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:24AM (#15032030)
    Classic slashdot. A ridiculously biased summary, and the last point is completely irrelevant to the subject.

    Hell yeah! CTO doesnt 'get' blogging!

    I wish more people were as blunt and forthcoming as Mr.Vogels.

    • Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053) <dylan@nOSpAM.dylanbrams.com> on Friday March 31 2006, @12:38AM (#15032062) Homepage Journal
      Biased or not, this particular blog entry is one of those entries that defines blogging - pointless, small in both approach and impact, boring, and overhyped.

      Around paragraph 3, I thought, "Go write some code or fill out a 27B stroke 6 somewhere." The amazing thing about modern society is that it hasn't produced more great art with more people, it's just produced more junk to get in the way.

      The summary is biased, the articles are biased, the only people interested in this particular fight are those who follow successful internet people around like pasty white guy paparazzi. Give it a rest.
      • You must not "'get it'".
      • You forgot to mention Full [example.com] of [example.com]
        h [example.com] y [example.com] p [example.com] e [example.com] r [example.com] l [example.com] i [example.com] n [example.com] k [example.com] s [example.com]
      • 27B stroke 6? 27B stroke 6?!?! Aarrrggghhhh!

        Now look what you've done!

        The amazing thing about modern society is that it hasn't produced more great art with more people, it's just produced more junk to get in the way.

        That's not amazing. Creating art takes talent; creating great art takes great talent. The majority of people with the talent are already doing it; most of those who could but choose not to aren't going to change their mind just because of the Internet.

      • Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)

        by lavaface (685630)
        The amazing thing about modern society is that it hasn't produced more great art with more people, it's just produced more junk to get in the way.

        While modern society has certainly produced more junk, I believe it's disingenuous to say that there isn't an astonishing amount of "good" art these days. Regardless of your taste, there are at least hundreds of people out there making something you will aesthetically appreciate. I doubt this was the case even a hundred years ago.

    • Just warming up for April Fool's Day.

      Oh joy.

      -ch
    • Classic slashdot. A ridiculously biased summary, and the last point is completely irrelevant to the subject.

      Amen.

      Hell yeah! CTO doesnt 'get' blogging!

      Yeah, that's why they have a search engine (A9 [a9.com]) and remote search protocol (OpenSearch [a9.com]) that's focused on blog type information. All you need to do is to look at the list of sources that it uses and implementations of the spec ... most of them are blogging software.

      Having read TFA (after finding it in all the links) seems to me like it's publicity for the off

  • The links....the confusion.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Crowhead (577505) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:26AM (#15032032)
    What the hell is this about again?

  • soap opera for nerds (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2006, @12:27AM (#15032034)
    More drama than a spanish soap opera. The only sad part is this lacks the good looking women and I can understand what they are saying...

  • A saying comes to mind... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frogbert (589961) <frogbert@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Friday March 31 2006, @12:27AM (#15032035)
    This story reminds me of a saying, something about arguing on the internet being like running in the special olympics... I can't quite remember how it ends though.

  • Who did what to who and what happened then and ..? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MasJ (594702) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:37AM (#15032058) Homepage
    Wow, am I the ONLY one here who can't make head or tail of what the text in that post says ? It's really confusing. Who did what to who and what happened then and where to who after what was done ? Mind clearing things up a bit ?
    • You're not the only one.
    • Amazon invites a couple of people to speak about corporate blogging, that being the general idea of having your own employees have blogs to talk about the company. Amazon CTO asks them some pointed questions during the presentation, which CTO considers to be rather obvious questions. The speakers are unable to answer his questions in an adequete manner, and consider the CTO to be "rude", as do some others at the presentation. CTO counters by saying that he didn't mean to be "rude", but felt that the present
  • It's ironic that the guy himself has a blog, he's an Amazon employee and he publishes "Amazon employees shouldn't be blogging" diatribes on it. I mean, I myself think blogs are idiotic with rare exceptions [guykawasaki.com], but his choosing of the medium is entertaining.
    • I mean, I myself think blogs are idiotic with rare exceptions, but his choosing of the medium is entertaining.

      I think his point was that blogs have no role in Amazon's business model - which appears fairly obvious to me.

      The place blogs generally seem to occupy in the internet is the "having a big whinge" category, and that's exactly what he's doing on his blog, in reply to the book's authors' whinge on their blog. Probably after this /. article, lots of other bloggers will get whinging about the fact that

  • Ah, the blogerati (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Bungi (221687) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Friday March 31 2006, @12:41AM (#15032077) Homepage
    I generally enjoy reading Scoble's blog because I think he's very honest about what he's doing and he does it in an environment that is probably not very conducive to the "total openess" he wants to have. He also gets points for even trying (though Microsoft was really one of the first larget tech corps to institutionalize blogging).

    That said... it seems to be this is a classic case of mass-induced elitism. I don't think the Amazon guy was off in his line of questioning. What's good for Microsoft or Sun might not be for Amazon or eBay, yet Scoble and his friend come across as the quitenssential "it" boys, giggling and stomping their little feet because the hick across the table doesn't know what the small fork is for - as if his life depended on it.

    I suppose if you live in that "blogosphere" long enough it must look to you like everyone is blogging and, more importantly, that everyone should be doing it. I don't think that's the case. I've found many corporate attempts at blogging to be underwhelming and downright stupid - if you don't "get it" then just don't do it at all. I doubt many millions of Amazon customers are going to decide one day that they won't spend a dime online anymore because Amazon doesn't have a blog.

    The blogorati need to come out into the light and look around once in a while.

    • Not to mention, some of us don't blog at work becuase were BUSY WITH WORK.

      I work hard. I have little free time in my life. After I come home I want to rest, talk to my wife, eat some dinner, play with my son, go outside. I still need to do the dishes and take out the trash, repair the door. Maybe I'll browse a few websites and make a few posts on ./ , but honestly-- some bloggers seem to have a ton of free time. Are they living in their parents basement, working at some cushy job or what?
    • I work as a consultant in the Mobile Portal space. The amount of times La La people walk in the door and try to have a love fest with marketing about hot hot hot stuff, yet with ZERO facts of figures to back it up makes me ....gag.

      Having grilled vendors before, I can imagine that he was harsh but fair. The fair bit stems from the fact that obviously they ( Amazon ) took time to arrange and attend a meeting. If I attend a meeting I want to be INFORMED. Not entertained by personal "opinion". I have plenty of

    • That said... it seems to be this is a classic case of mass-induced elitism. I don't think the Amazon guy was off in his line of questioning. What's good for Microsoft or Sun might not be for Amazon or eBay, yet Scoble and his friend come across as the quitenssential "it" boys, giggling and stomping their little feet because the hick across the table doesn't know what the small fork is for - as if his life depended on it.

      Indeed. Scoble and Isreal both gush over how other people fell at their feet to recie

  • The guy doesn't want to kowtow to Israel? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by putko (753330) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:44AM (#15032086) Homepage Journal
    It would seem that if the Amazon guy doesn't want to kowtow to Mr. Israel (and why would he), the blogger guy is likely to wage some sort of blogger-jihad against Amazon.

    Is that likely to cause them any trouble? Amazon seems to be quite good at what they do.

    I have a feeling that this is a case where he can tell Israel to kiss his ass.

  • Never wrestle a pig... (Score:5, Funny)

    by frank_adrian314159 (469671) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:46AM (#15032090) Homepage
    You'll just get muddy and the pig enjoys it.

    I'm not sure if I'm referring to the meeting in the story or the post on Slashdot, either...

  • Reads like a forum flamewar (Score:4, Funny)

    by The_reformant (777653) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:47AM (#15032096)
    I read all the trackbacks and comments linked and basically it reads like a polite version of a forum flamewar. You can actually almost see that behind their carefully creafted words they really at heart want to write something like "OMG ur teh gay!". If this is what 2 "blogging poster boys" and the CTO of one of the most high profile online retailers do with their blogs then I think Amazon and anyone else would do well to stay as far clear of them as they can.

  • Exceptions (Score:3, Funny)

    by AndroidCat (229562) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:56AM (#15032121) Homepage
    You've probably noticed that a bunch of big companies are getting this or that smart person to come by and chat with the troops on particular topics.
    Oh? Yahoo got Tom Cruise.
  • From one click purchasing to one dick blogging, is there anything Amazon doesn't have patents on?

  • I love me some drama... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ibanez (37490) on Friday March 31 2006, @01:51AM (#15032242)
    And really love some good flamewar action. So I saw "rips a new one" and was geared up for one hell of a great story.

    Boy, was I wrong. I need to update my definition for that phrase.
  • Drama drama drama blog drama drama Amazon drama blog smug smug drama blog Amazon smung drama blah.

    Why is this news we give a flying leap about?

  • Classic case of pundits versus practitioners (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tgma (584406) on Friday March 31 2006, @02:02AM (#15032263)
    Having been in business (finance) for 15 years, I have been in a similar position to the CTO on occasion. The world is full of armchair quarterbacks, who are able to scratch a living in journalism and from writing books. Some of these people have real insights, some are just cobbling together platitudes on fashionable subjects. By and large, I tend to discount people who sell opinions on any subject, if they have never tried to make a living out of the implications of that opinion.

    My feeling is that this CTO is in the position that well-meaning people are happily giving him advice all the time about what Amazon should be doing. He has limited resources in terms of time and money, so he needs a well-primed bullshit filter to make sure that he's not wasting his time. The first thing you do when talking to a consultant is to establish their bona fides, and to test them on the basis for their recommendations. You can start to believe their general statements, when you can see that their conclusions are based on real research and not thought experiments.

    When someone is using the phrase "you just don't get (whatever subject)" I counter that it's up to them to convince me. There were lots of people putting crazy valuations on internet stocks in the late 90s. When you asked them how they justified the valuations, they would come up with over-optimistic projections about the amount of money that could be made from the net. Often they would assume that one company's revenues would be greater than the entire spending on that product category. Eventually the conversation would get to a stage where it was clear that they had no data to support their hypotheses, and they would wheel out the phrase "you just don't get it".

    They could just as easily have said "oh ye of little faith". That's appropriate in a religious setting, but not where my clients' money is concerned. It's also my experience that people who have faith in irrational things tend to view any aggressive questioning as rude. I remember one of my analysts getting very upset when it was pointed out to her that her opinion on a particular company was at odds with her own facts - her only defence was to scream at me for being rude. Often if people have no real counter-arguments, they react to bad news and criticism by criticising the way it was delivered.
  • So these guys think that Amazon doesn't "get" blogging. Well, what if Amazon does get it And Mr. Israel and others are the ones who don't? And what is this "rude treatment" I hear? The guys went to Amazon to talk about blogging. And they were asked some hard questions. Is that "rudeness"? No it's not. It seems to me that the complainers are thinking that "we are mighty blog-experts, and everything we say is gold. Asking us questions is rude and if you disagree with us, then you do not "get" blogging, since
  • What is blogging all about? Whining, Soapboxing, Browbeating. None of these activities are particularly useful, especially on the company dime.
  • Buddy Holly dies = the day the music died

    Blog becomes a nauseating, overused word = the day the internet died
    • they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are. I doubt blogging is going anywhere.

      • Re:Nobody Cares (Score:4, Funny)

        by JanneM (7445) on Friday March 31 2006, @12:40AM (#15032071) Homepage
        they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are.

        Of course, they also said that about the cravatte, off-white nylon shirts with huge collars, pet rocks, steam cars and listening to live plays via the telephone. And they were right.

        That said, no, I don't think blogging is a fad either; it's too useful for that.

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