amazon

A short 2009 video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and Zappos. He discusses customer focus, invention and long-term thinking.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

A Ryan George comedy sketch about the absurdities of shopping on Amazon, including nonsense brand names, fake reviews and scammy sellers.

A South Park clip in which Butters' dad takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet. It satirizes warehouse work conditions.

Doug DeMuro reviews the Rivian electric delivery van built for Amazon, walking through its quirks, features and design innovations. It is a long, detailed tour of the vehicle inside and out.

Louis Rossmann examines fuses sold on Amazon that fail to trip at their rated current, including a 2A fuse surviving 8 amps. He uses it to criticize Amazon's lax control over safety-relevant products.

LockPickingLawyer picks an Amazon's Choice 'high security' padlock in about two seconds.

A LockPickingLawyer video showing that a padlock sold as an Amazon's Choice high-security product can be opened trivially, with no picking needed.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.

A first-day ride-along with an Amazon delivery driver using the Rivian electric delivery van. She covers the van's new technology, how it compares to the standard Ford Transit delivery vehicles, and quirks and issues she noticed on the job.

FTC Chair Lina Khan sits down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to discuss the agency's work protecting consumers from unfair business practices. Topics include the FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, healthcare industry actions, and whether tech companies are racing to control AI.

Scott Galloway's DLD15 talk assessing the competitive positions of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. He argues about where each is strong and weak, including Amazon's need for physical retail.

Rick Houlihan's AWS re:Invent 2018 deep dive on advanced DynamoDB design patterns. It covers index overloading, GSI sharding, composite keys, graph processing and transactions.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.

A Saturday Night Live sketch for the Amazon Echo Silver, a smart speaker for the elderly, in which older users misunderstand Alexa. It parodies voice assistants.

A short scene from the Amazon series Patriot in which a spy character gives a deadpan, jargon-filled lecture about pipes and nut plate spacing. It is a comedic bit of corporate-cover absurdity.

A short CNBC report on Zipline, which has delivered medical supplies by drone in Rwanda since 2016 and is preparing to start in the U.S.

A 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos taped at a Special Libraries conference, where he explains why Amazon started with books and why the web made it possible. He calls it the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce.

Amazon's Jon Jenkins at Velocity 2011 on how operations can drive revenue and on Amazon's highly available, autonomous architectures. It includes details on deployment frequency and Amazon's move to AWS.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2017 talk on leadership and organizational principles, ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and Amazon. He argues for the difference between principles and values and criticizes vague corporate principles.

Micro Men is a 2009 BBC comic drama about the early 1980s British home computer boom. It follows the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Acorn founder Chris Curry over the BBC Micro contract and the ZX Spectrum.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

Jenny Nicholson's roughly four-hour review of her two-night stay on Disney's Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser immersive hotel. She goes through the experience, its story and production, and why it failed.

A feature-length Defunctland documentary on the history of Disney's FastPass and FastPass+ expedited queue systems. It covers how the systems evolved and how they were designed, with simulation of their effects on park lines.

The full 1997 WWDC session in which Steve Jobs, newly back at Apple, takes developer questions for about an hour. He discusses OpenDoc, Microsoft, clones, Newton, advertising and Apple's strategy.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

The full 80-minute Macworld 2007 keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone. It includes the multitouch demos, visual voicemail and scrolling.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

The Google I/O 2009 keynote introducing Google Wave, a real-time collaborative communication and document platform. It includes a long live demo and the developer preview announcement.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Apple's classic 'Think Different' commercial, a one-minute spot celebrating creative misfits and innovators. This upload is from 2006.

Footage from the Macworld Boston 1997 keynote where Steve Jobs announces Apple's deal with Microsoft, with Bill Gates appearing on the big screen. The almost bankrupt Apple took Microsoft's investment, and the crowd reacted badly, including booing over Internet Explorer as the default browser.