The scope of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’
empire is “without precedent in the long
history of American capitalism,” said
Franklin Foer in The Atlantic. Today,
“if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized
power in the United States, they could
nationalize Amazon and call it a day.” The
company controls nearly 40 percent of all
e-commerce in the U.S.; it conducts more
product searches than Google; it controls
almost half of the cloud-computing indus-
try, serving everything from Netflix to the
Central Intelligence Agency; it’s responsible
for 42 percent of all books sold and a third
of the market for streaming video. “It has collected the world’s
most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire” and assembled
a vast global logistics business. “Last year, Amazon didn’t pay
a cent of federal tax” on $11.2 billion in profits, and yet “the
government rewards this failure with massive contracts that will
make the company even bigger.” This is reason to both marvel
and cower: “Jeff Bezos has won capitalism.”For some entrepreneurs, Amazon has been “a godsend,” said
Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker. More than 1.9 million small
businesses in the U.S. use Amazon’s services; last year, “nearly
200,000 sellers earned at least $100,000 each on the site.” But
others fear the company founded by Jeff Bezos on 14 axiom-
atic Leadership Principles—which employees were expected tostudy “like Talmudic texts”—has made a
pronounced shift toward “simply selling
everything as fast and as cheaply as pos-
sible.” Critics say that Amazon uses the
data it collects from customers “to divine
which products are poised to become
blockbusters and then copies them,”
which Amazon denies. Its rush to make
delivery ever faster has taken a heavy
toll on employees and contractors; there
have been at least 60 serious or fatal ac-
cidents involving Amazon since 2015.
And all this is being led by a surprisingly
insular group: On Amazon’s powerful
18- member “S-Team” of top executives, there’s only one woman.Bezos is undoubtedly listening to his critics, said Taylor Locke
in CNBC.com. He thinks that “having the ability to see multiple
viewpoints” is the key to Amazon’s fourth and most surpris-
ing leadership principle: “Be right, a lot.” Most people, says
Bezos,“just seek out information to bolster their current beliefs
and tune out opposing opinions,” while good leaders do the op-
posite. But don’t count on Amazon changing its approach just
because it’s in the political crosshairs, said Monica Nickelsburg
in GeekWire.com. It has lobbying muscle and a public policy
team that’s drawn from Washington’s top ranks. There’s a
“magnifying glass on the company,” and Amazon will keep tak-
ing heat. But Bezos is “playing the long game.”Amazon: The terrifying power of Jeff Bezos
Getty
,^ TobiiThere’s no fix for dead AirPods
“Cupertino, we have a problem,” said Geof-
frey Fowler in The Washington Post. AirPods
are great, but when the batteries wear out,
they become useless. Apple will replace your
dying earbuds for free if they are less than
a year old. After that, if you just take them
into an Apple Store, employees are likely to
say that there’s no way to fix the AirPods.
Because, in fact, there isn’t: I performed an
autopsy on a pair of AirPods and “found so
much glue I couldn’t even tug out the now-
exposed end of the battery with tweezers.”
But if you make sure to use the phrase “bat-
tery service”—really, code for tossing out the
AirPods and giving you a new pair—Apple
will replace them for $49 for each ear.Campaigns turn to phone tracking
Political parties are “increasingly tapping into
a new source of data”: your smartphone, said
Sam Schechner in The Wall Street Journal.
Campaigns can track potential voters “based
on apps they use and places they have been,
including rallies, churches, and gun clubs.”
The data can be traced to a specific person,
“allowing campaigns to determine who gets
a fundraising call or a knock on the door.”
Among the earliest to try this approach wasBeto O’Rourke, whose Senate campaign in
2018 hired a company that “collected the
unique ID numbers of phones that pinged their
location” while at a rally, then matched IDs
with email addresses. A political action commit-
tee supporting President Trump has also been
using a company that employs location data
gathered from phones to send targeted ads.S.F. proposes licenses for new tech
“San Francisco may open a new office to pre-
vent ‘reckless’ tech rollouts,” said Jon Fingas
in Engadget.com. Tired of piles of abandoned
scooters and other “out-of-control tech de-
ployments,” the city last week revealed a
proposal for a new office that will license new
technologies. Supporters paint the new agency
as a way to centralize the process for startups
to get the necessary licenses to operate in the
city—for instance, the transportation license
and public health license that a food-delivering
robot might need. But it “would also gauge
the potential effects of a rollout and shut
down projects that could harm privacy, safety,
and security.” The proposed legislation is
unlikely to please startups, which “may take
longer to deploy their offering,”—an outcome
that many San Franciscans weary of technol-
ogy tests may see as a feature, not a bug.Bytes: What’s new in tech
New eye-
tracking
equip-
ment can
use a
person’s
pupils to
operate a
computer,
said David Ewalt in The Wall Street
Journal. Pat Quinn, who suffers
from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
or ALS, employs the hardware,
made by Stockholm-based Tobii,
to “speak, write, change the tele-
vision channel, or turn the lights
on” by flicking his eyes over a
computer screen. While assistive
computers and speech-generating
devices aren’t new, they’ve typi-
cally “required patients to select
words using a joystick or physical
switch”—or, in the case of the late
physicist Stephen Hawking, twitch-
ing a cheek muscle. Tobii’s device
is “quicker, more accurate, and
easier to operate.” One company is
experimenting with the eye-tracking
hardware “to help control X-ray
scanners, reducing patient and doc-
tor radiation exposure.”Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
Bezos’ fourth principle: ‘Be right, a lot.’