What really burns my ass is that I had a series of e-mail convos with
Bezos in the earliest days that could have lead them near here nearly 20
years ago? He engaged enough to convince me he took me seriously, but
in the end... not so much.
At the time, I was trying to rescue an independent bookstore from the
inevitable demise of the times and suggested (while Amazon was still
*mostly* books) that if he could get in bed with existing *indies*
(books or otherwise), they could act as a *cache* for AMZ... that
instead of saying "ship it overnight for $8.99", or more to the point,
in complement to that offer... "Or for the same $8.99, drop in at XYZ
store at 123 ABC street and pick up your copy right now!"
The indies were scared (and rightly so) of online shopping, and too many
locked their brakes and went into a four wheel skid over the cliff when
some *very* judicious application of brake, gas, steering might have let
more stay upright.
Sure, the indies would have to depend more on impulse buys, people
coming in to pick up their heavily discounted copy of "whatever", but
then that cup of coffee, that greeting card, that photo calendar, that
fancy box of paper clips... *that* is what they'd have stayed alive
with, and the *rest* of us would still have places to go in and browse,
maybe see things juxtaposed we never knew we wanted to read.
Netflix got an early handle on things with their USPS deal to get
notified when a DVD was mailed back... and then have caches in nearby
cities (ABQ for us?) so that when I send something you are waiting for
back, it never goes further than ABQ to get to you.
I am also left thinking of "memoisation" in CS.. though it is not a
perfect fit.
When at Powells in Portland, they had a Print and Bind on Demand system,
I think they were mainly offering works from Project Gutenberg
(Copyright free, cost of printing only) but maybe some others. It is
an idea that would have been powerful 20 years ago... but... I'm afraid
with eBooks today it may be no more than an eclectic Anachronism.
On 1/18/14, 11:07 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
"Applied Complexity" at its best?
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/?ncid=tcdaily
I can think of various analogues to this in computer science. One is
profile guided optimization, where instrumentation is added to a code
so that it records where it has been. Then those records are used to
guide refinement of the compilation of the code so that it anticipates
where it is likely to go. For example, prefetching data, or setting
branch probability hints in the code. This is in some sense Amazon
prefetching their deliveries so that they will be in cache (near the
likely buyer) should the buyer actually ask for them. Some advanced
database systems (or just database administrators) do the same thing
for large systems -- looking at who tends to use certain tables, and
making sure those users are near their data.
Marcus
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