Jay Marcyes

Old article about Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos, but it's still a good read. Great quote about why Amazon chose Washington for its headquarters:

It starts with the realization that in fact not everything should be virtual - that Amazon.com should own its own warehouses, so that it can maintain quality control over the packaging and shipping of orders, which Bezos sees as an essential opportunity to enhance the Amazon.com customer experience. This allows the company to combine orders for books from multiple publishers - or orders that include a book, a CD, and a video - into single packages. It also gives Amazon.com employees who pack orders a chance to check for defective goods. In its music department, for example, the company will replace cracked or broken CD jewel cases. Locating in Seattle, therefore, wasn't about being near a technology hub as much as it was about being near one of Ingram's distribution facilities, which allowed for quicker turnaround on deliveries from that key supplier. And Washington had a relatively small population, which limited the pool of potential customers from whom Amazon.com would be forced to collect sales tax. (It's no accident that the company's second warehouse is in Delaware, which not only has no sales tax but is also an ideal base for serving East Coast customers; its third and latest warehouse is near Reno, Nevada - which lets Amazon.com originate deliveries close to the huge California population, but just outside that state's tax-collection borders.)

Interesting interview with Malcolm Gladwell. Something I found interesting, on the caste system in the US:

ours [British] being a society where there may still be some correlation
between success and the class you are born into. Really interesting, though,
is the hole Gladwell punches through the hoary stereotype we sometimes hold
about America – that by contrast, it is a classless meritocracy.

"Both countries stack the deck in favour of certain people over others,"
he begins. "They choose to stack it in different ways. Americans do
perhaps use more subtle mechanisms for doing so. But there is certainly an
Ivy League caste system here that rewards and promotes kids by virtue of
having gone to a small set of colleges and entry into those colleges. While
it appears meritocratic, in large part it is not. You get there because your
dad went there or you are a jock of some kind." Here is something that
surprised me. Gladwell cites studies showing that Europeans in the lowest
economic classes have a far greater chance of moving up in the world than
Americans. "Once you are rich in America you stay rich... but if you
are at the bottom it just never happens, statistically, it never happens
that people make it. And that's very different from western European
counties." Oh well, so much for the land-of-opportunity myth.

Great interview with Owen Byrne, the first Digg developer. It goes through some of the actual history of Digg and debunks some of the myths of how Digg was really started.

The microsoft jobs blog, supposedly has useful helps and insider information about how to get a job with Microsoft