Inside the Giant Machine: A Funny Sad Amazon.com Story

I was lured into reading “Inside the Giant Machine” by the “inside story” angle. I expected an interesting though somewhat mechanical narration, like a gripping news documentary. But upon reading further into the book, I discovered it was a little more than that.

In the very first chapter, I was hooked in by the author’s quirky sense of humor. Okay, he was a bit geeky – at the start of the book, for instance, he describes his love affair with a computer program, of all things – but the way he tells it makes it all sound so charming.

Charm. I think that is a good word to sum up what I found in this book. There is charm in the author’s wit, in his wide-eyed description of Seattle from the eyes of an Indian migrant, in his undisguised admiration of the American female, in his tender devotion to his family, even in the honesty of his sorrow when he realizes that the company he had once admired from the outside was far from perfect when seen from the inside.

One thing not so charming about the book, though, is the author’s undeniable bitterness towards Amazon’s management. I mean, okay, the book is the inside story of Amazon.com, so bitterness (sour grapes?) should be expected. But the thing is, for some reason, the bitterness/sourness in the story does not cross over from him, the author, to me, the reader.

In my opinion, an effective story should make the reader feel the same way as the author. In this case, I merely felt like a spectator watching somebody gripe about a company that treated him wrong. I saw his pain, but I did not feel it.

But when he talks about the things he admired about Amazon.com, I feel as wide-eyed and fascinated as he was. Like when the author described how humongous Amazon’s fulfillment centers were – did you know you could fit thirteen football fields inside one of these centers? And can you imagine the robotlike efficiency and tirelessness that a worker in one of these centers is expected to have, to keep Amazon’s inventory moving at Amazon’s desired rate? It’s all in the book.

The author also described the ruthless way by which Amazon.com’s management regularly culls the bottom 10% of its employees. That surprised me at first, but if you think about it, it’s probably the secret behind Amazon.com’s success.

All in all, this is a sad story that was able to make me laugh. It had sourness tempered by a lot of sweet. There is balance in the book, like the taste of nicely ripened grapes. To enjoy it, you just need to spit out the seeds, or swallow them.

(Review by Beatrice Adams)