Long story, short: for 15 or 16 years, my life's been tied to Amazon in a sort of, humorous and ironic faux death-match....I know more about them than Stone does, that's for certain.
And it's also for certain that he's full of sh!t.
I was in a position to know about Bezos' decision to move from selling books to selling "everything on line" before it was publicly announced.
In fact - in what will probably amount to the most epic "miss" of my life - I chuckled a little and scoffed at the idea.
Now, Amazon's moved into the neighborhood I've lived in since 91, and taken over everything. My building's home to scores of Amazon programmers and engineers. I'm an IT Director who started in programming so, talking shop with these guy's has been pretty sweet.
I haven't heard any of them say so much as one thing negative about their jobs: they resprect Bezos and "by and large" enjoy where they work and what they do.
Microsoft employees, on the other hand...
Bump!
For every one of those programmers there are ten people moving merchandise in a warehouse that are given impossible standards of performance, managed by managers that think they are lords of the realm and making sure that full time regular employees are filtered out of the system when they hit the top tier of wages.
It’s funny that you mention that. I sat down with a microsoft employee yesterday who “bad mouthed” (to be fair it was simply the truth and not bitterness) their company. This is a first for me, and I’ve met a lot of microsoft employees. They usually sound like borg that couldn’t wait to re-join the collective as soon as they were done talking to the impure technical people that work with more than one technology.