It’s time for Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc., to take over as founder / senior statesman – like the Wizard of Oz, often unseen, but with seemingly almighty control – while the boss of Amazon’s cloud computing takes the lead .
The change at the top will not change much to Amazon AMZN,
but it can affect the most important choice the company faces: Whether Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com stay under the same roof.
While Bezos regularly deals with Apple Inc. AAPL is compared,
co-founder Steve Jobs, his departure from CEO looks more like the death of batons by technical CEO legends such as Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
and Larry Page of Alphabet Inc. GOOG,
GOOGL,
Bezos is stepping down as CEO as the company sets new records, but he will remain chairman of the e-commerce giant he founded in the early days of the dot-com bubble.
Just as Page handed over the leader of its most lucrative division, Sundar Pichai – first as CEO of Google and then Alphabet -, Bezos tapped Andy Jassy of Amazon Web Services, the company’s largest profit generator. Bezos sounded on Tuesday after his ambitions after CEO, and continued to build one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world.
“I’ve never had more energy, and it’s not about retiring,” Bezos said in an email to employees that plans for the nonprofit Bezos Earth Fund, rocket building at Blue Origin and its ownership of the Washington Post. “I’m very passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.”
At Amazon, Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer, said Bezos would be involved in what Amazon calls “one-way issues” – major strategic decisions, such as the acquisition of Whole Foods.
“Jeff has always been involved in that, and this is where we will focus his time,” Olsavsky told analysts.
It really will not change much from the outside, and probably internally as well. These kind of big swings seemed like the things Bezos had long focused on, leaving the day-to-day management to lieutenants. In recent years, Bezos has been less the public face of Amazon, amid so much attention to its growing wealth, the commercial race to space and its recent status as a media mogul. He does not participate in quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street and instead writes an annual shareholder letter and chairs Amazon’s annual general meeting. More recently, his public appearances ranged from elite technology conferences, when it was still a thing, to the testimony of Congress during recent hearings on antitrust congresses.
“Bezos is not as visible as some CEOs, and it will be interesting to see if Andy takes a different approach,” said Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Inc. ‘Andy was the visible focus spokesperson for AWS. It will be interesting to see if he takes it with Amazon as well. ”
Also read: Future CEO Andy Jassy helped build Amazon’s cloud
Jassy will also have to prove that he can manage more than just AWS, which is a critical part of Amazon, but not nearly the size of the entire company.
‘They’re digital commerce, they’s a grocery store, they’re a trucking business, they’re in shipping, warehousing and manufacturing. They have a lot of people in their ecosystem, a lot of workers, they were the biggest employer in the pandemic. There are a lot of things going on, ” said Daniel Newman, chief analyst at Futurum Research.
“Andy literally prototyped his ability to lead Amazon through his work at AWS,” Neman added.
Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, speaks at the AWS re: Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas.
Associated Press
One problem Jassy may face when he takes over as CEO later this year is the biggest question about AWS: will it remain part of Amazon? Jassy has been working on AWS from the beginning and was his biggest supporter. It therefore seems unlikely that he would prefer to separate it from the company he now runs.
Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, predicted in a recent book that Amazon could dismantle the business, possibly over the antitrust actions the government would take with Big Tech over the next year, to prevent. On Twitter, Galloway was asked on Tuesday about his prediction, saying that Jassy’s promotion is likely to reduce the chances of that, while emphasizing Bezos’ performance.
“I think [a potential AWS spinoff] is one of the issues that Andy will have to deal with in one form or another, ”said Gartner’s Anderson. “It simply came to our notice then. There are good arguments to be made in both ways. They currently operate as fairly independent organizations. ”
Bezos will surely have his say in the decision, just as Gates said in Microsoft’s direction until last year. It seems inconceivable to investors to propose Amazon without the visionary Bezos, but he could remain for years, even decades, as executive chairman, as Gates has proven.
Investors should hope that Jassy is more like Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, than Gates’ immediate successor, Steve Ballmer, who struggled to move Microsoft into the mobile era. While Jassy tries to manipulate Amazon into his next era, Bezos will still be there to make sure he succeeds.