Amazon: A new chief cast in the Bezos mold
Jeff Bezos will leave his successor, Andy Jassy, with “both massive challenges and enormous opportunities,” said Kara Swisher in The New York Times. Bezos is the only leader Amazon has ever had. But Jassy, who will take over as CEO of the company later this year, has been perhaps his “most loyal lieutenant, joining Bezos right out of Harvard Business School in 1997.” He built Amazon Web Services from “a skunkworks inside a larger company” into “one of the most valuable entities in the world.” And like Bezos—who will remain Amazon’s chairman—Jassy “hates to lose.”
AWS has been “the engine of Amazon’s continuous reinvention” for years, said Nick Statt in TheVerge.com, “and Jassy is the spark that helps drive it.” He was years ahead of competitors in realizing the potential in letting “third-party companies build their own e-commerce operations” atop Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Companies from Netflix to Airbnb to Twitter now use AWS to build and maintain their businesses, because Amazon can offer “unparalleled resources” and easy-to-use development tools. Remarkably, AWS accounted for 63 percent of Amazon’s profits in 2020 and holds a larger share of the entire cloud infrastructure market than its two closest competitors, Microsoft and Google, combined.
All this doesn’t mean Amazon can or will ignore its retail business, said Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. Jassy’s appointment has “spawned the predictable avalanche of interpretations that the cloud is now Amazon’s most important business.” But the company’s retail revenue last year was six times what AWS generated, not even including the subscription fees customers pay for Prime. Jassy has to prove he knows how to “sell books, sweatpants, and talking speakers” as well as run a tech business.
Bezos’ announcement last week that he would give up the CEO spot came as a jolt, but he’s “been laying the groundwork for such a move for years,” said Dana Mattioli and Sebastian Herrera in The Wall Street Journal. Recently he has “focused much more on high-level strategic decisions,” and he’s known to “quip that the only time he really knew all that was going at Amazon was in its annual budget meetings.” As executive chairman, an increasingly popular title among Silicon Valley founders, he’ll be a “strategic guide” for Jassy. His successor can use that because there won’t be any “honeymoon period,” said Jay Greene and Cat Zakrzewski in The Washington Post. Within a day of Amazon announcing Jassy’s coming ascent, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, said, “I look forward to talking to him about competition issues.”