By Mike Daisey
Free Press, June 2002
240 pages, $23
There are a couple of things that make this book different from all the “I worked inside the dot-com bubble” books flooding the market. First, Amazon is still in business. Second, Daisey, a self-professed slacker, is funny. Among other things, Daisey worked as an Amazon customer service rep, so he got a first-hand look at the company’s technology in action. The view wasn’t pretty. The infrastructure, for instance, consistently failed to keep up with the company’s phenomenal growth. When the computers were down, Daisey had to jot down credit card numbers on Post-it Notes. As Daisey puts it: “Amazon is the world’s most aggressively marketed beta product.”