Meet Amazon.com’s First Employee

GeekWire interviews Shel Kaphan:

I remember, at one point, Jeff was all excited that we call it Relentless with the idea that we would relentlessly satisfy customer needs or something. It took a little convincing that perhaps that was not going to have the right connotations in everybody’s minds.

Is that worse than MacMan?

One of the early controversies about the company is that we were claiming that we had a million titles. Well, we did have a million titles. We didn’t have a million books, but we had a million titles in the sense that we could order them. We might find out that the publishers might take several months to get them to us.

He says the company surpassed even Bezos’ expectations of size and scope.

Sandbox Corners

Daniel Jalkut:

I think that Apple would have a lot more developer enthusiasm for this feature if it wasn’t so clear to many of us that our apps will be forced to lose features in order to adopt sandboxing. And while users may be happy about the prospects of improved security with the sandbox, I think there will be less excitement about the diminished functionality of apps whose features don’t fit nicely into the sandbox confines.

Sandboxing is a very nice idea in theory, but so far the benefits seem to be hypothetical while the costs—in features and development time—are real. Furthermore, we’re coming up on the November deadline, and Apple has yet to actually say what its policy will be.

Mac Sandboxing