Bezos Quits, will Jassy Fit ?

Surprise, surprise...

source : Kelly Caminero


Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said Tuesday he would be stepping down as CEO of the legendary ecommerce company to become its executive chair. The news, announced in a note to employees, arrived alongside Amazon’s earnings for the fourth quarter of 2020, during which the company generated over $125 billion in sales, propelled by holiday shopping and pandemic buying.

"[...] The successor will face both massive challenges and enormous opportunities as he assumes control of the e-commerce behemoth."
NYT

Who will replace the boss ?

Who, you might ask at this moment, is Andy Jassy? He’s a talented entrepreneur, for sure, having built Amazon Web Services from a skunkworks inside a larger company starting in 2006 to one of the most valuable entities in the world. He’s been controversial, too, leading the development of AWS’ Rekognition facial recognition software and vociferously defending it when law enforcement has been accused of misusing it. Mr. Jassy has been diplomatic, making sure that AWS has largely avoided the crises that have ensnared other digital entities nested inside Amazon [...]

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[OC] Over time, AWS became Amazon’s main profit driver. Perhaps more notably, it got a lot brainier too, as Amazon figured out that infusing its cloud service with machine learning tools might give it a leg up on rivals Microsoft, Google, and IBM. In 2016, AWS released new machine learning services that allowed AWS customers, “which span from giants like Pinterest and Netflix to tiny startups, to build their own mini Alexas,” Steven Levy wrote in WIRED. It also launched a new cloud-based computer-vision service called Rekognition. View More

The reasons behind this unexpected departure

Mr. Bezos’s ambition was clear even when I first met him in the mid-1990s. The head of a scrappy company, he raced like a dervish between the shelves of its single warehouse, talking a big game for a small and wiry 30-year-old in pleated khakis and Oxford shirts. He engaged with the media a lot back then because he needed us on his tireless climb upward. He was always in touch, explaining some new innovation that would deliver on his promise of creating the “earth’s biggest bookstore.”
Looking back, it seems like such a quaint ambition now. Amazon has marched into every arena of commerce, building moat after moat — logistical, financial, customer service — to keep its rivals from catching up. It expanded into selling its own wares, into physical retail, entertainment and into all manner of home monitoring devices. And it has its Sauron-like eye aimed relentlessly on a whole lot more than that.
Not surprisingly, the ever-larger Amazon has started to run into even bigger roadblocks. They vary as much as its businesses do, from an invented freak show competition over the opening of a new headquarters, to its attempt to clamp down on unionization, to complaints from third-party sellers about its use of data, to its astonishing and disturbing ability to expand its power amid an economically devastating pandemic and mass suffering.

And now, Mr. Bezos is headed for the exit

A rightful successor

“I never waste my time thinking about stuff like that [...] You shouldn’t either.”

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Mr. Jassy said clearly that it was not up to Amazon to be the moral arbiter of the world, but that he would like government to step in. “People are looking for those extra sets of protections around the federal government explaining how they want the (facial-recognition) technology to be used and [to have] real ramifications if you misuse it,” he said. “And I wish they would hurry up, because if they don’t … you’re going to have 50 different laws in 50 different states.” When I asked him about having to spin off AWS in the wake of a potential antitrust investigation — a prospect that would scare many — he shrugged. “If we were forced to do it, I guess we would have to do it,” he said. “We don’t spend a lot of time talking about it.”
NY Times' article Wired's article
It went like that for the whole interview, with Mr. Jassy playing the true Amazon believer who could handle the pressure and plow on, polite but firm, reasonable but relentless. It made it clear to me then why he would be the one Mr. Bezos would ultimately pick as his successor. As we were leaving the stage, I told him so and he just shrugged. “I never waste my time thinking about stuff like that,” Mr. Jassy said, laughing. “You shouldn’t either.” No longer

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