Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story

In 2008, Amazon.com established a new record even as sales at the U.S. store chains were the weakest in decades - more than 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide on its peak shopping day; amounting to 72.9 items per second. Awesome! How large a machine do you need to process and ship this kind of volume? How efficiently do you need operate it? And what kind of people do you need to keep it going?The author, a former Technology leader from Amazon.com writing under a pen name, gives us a vivid, sometime brutal inside scoop on Amazon.com's giant machinery, describing its cold and calculating culture in detail. The story begins in Silicon Valley where we go through author's experiences in the fast moving world of a Hi-Tech start up. Soon thereafter, the author's start-up is acquired and he finds himself a job. The economic meltdown forces him to look for greener pastures. He finds one in Seattle, a medley of lush green hills surrounded by snow capped mountains and sparking blue waters. Amazon.com--an Internet company based in Seattle which has taken the stock markets by storm, and has been transforming itself from an online retailer to an eCommerce platform, led by a CEO who leads this transformation but is not afraid to act goofy.It begins as a story of a technologist leaving behind his beloved Silicon Valley for Seattle. It unfolds into a moving story capturing Seattle's beauty, its interesting people and culture; and the inside scoop on the dot-com world - both the excitement and joy of innovation, and also the dark side of a culture driven by metrics, including "Cruelty curve", a quota for letting go of a certain number of people every year, based on their relative performance graded on a "curve".Note: Portions of this book have been previously published under title "Seattle Adventures".