It’s time for Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos to take his turn as a senior founder / statesman – like the Wizard of Oz, often invisible but with seemingly omnipotent control – as the head of Amazon’s cloud computing arm takes the lead.
The change at the top will not change much about Amazon AMZN,
but it can affect the most crucial choice the company faces: whether Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com will remain under the same roof.
Although Bezos is often compared to Apple Inc. AAPL,
co-founder Steve Jobs, his departure from the position of CEO is more akin to the passing of batons by legends of tech CEOs like Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
and Larry Page of Alphabet Inc. GOOG,
GOOGL,
Bezos is stepping down as CEO as the company breaks new records, but will remain president of the e-commerce giant it founded in the early days of the dot-com bubble.
As soon as Page handed the reins to the leader of his most profitable division, Sundar Pichai – first as CEO of Google and then at Alphabet – Bezos separated Andy Jassy from the company’s biggest profit generator, Amazon Web Services. Addressing his post-CEO ambitions, Bezos on Tuesday looked more like Gates, who built one of the largest nonprofits in the world.
“I’ve never had more energy, and it’s not about retiring,” said Bezos in an e-mail to employees that detailed the plans for the construction of Blue Origin rockets and its property in the Washington Post of the Bezos Earth Fund. “I am very excited about the impact that I think these organizations can have.”
At Amazon, chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said Bezos would be involved in what Amazon calls “one-way issues” – big strategic decisions like the acquisition of Whole Foods.
“Jeff has always been involved in this, and that’s where we’re going to focus his time,” Olsavsky told analysts on the company’s earnings conference call.
This will not really mean much change externally and probably also internally. These kinds of big swings seem to be the things Bezos has been focusing on for a long time, leaving the day-to-day management to the lieutenants. In recent years, Bezos has been less of the public face of Amazon, amid so much attention on his growing wealth, the commercial space race and his recent status as a media tycoon. He does not participate in quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street and instead writes an annual letter to shareholders and chairs Amazon’s annual general meeting. More recently, his public appearances ranged from elite technology conferences, when they still existed, to testimony in Congress at recent Congressional antitrust hearings.
“Bezos is not as visible as some CEOs, it will be interesting to see if Andy has a different attitude,” said Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “Andy has been the visible focal spokesperson for AWS. It will be interesting to see if he takes this with Amazon too. ”
Read too: Future CEO Andy Jassy helped build the Amazon cloud
Jassy will also have to prove that he is capable of running more than just AWS, which is a critical part of Amazon, but out of scope for the entire company.
“They are digital commerce, they are grocery stores, they are truck drivers, they are in shipping, storage and manufacturing. They have many people in their ecosystem, many manual workers, they were the biggest employer in the pandemic. There’s a lot going on, ”said Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research.
“Andy was literally making a prototype of his ability to lead Amazon, through his work at AWS,” added Neman.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks during the AWS re: Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas.
Associated Press
One puzzle that Jassy may face while in the CEO chair later this year is the biggest question about AWS: will it remain part of Amazon? Jassy worked at AWS from the beginning and has been its most expressive proponent, so it seems unlikely that he will decide to separate her from the company he now runs.
Scott Galloway, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, predicted in a recent book that Amazon could break up the deal, possibly to prevent any antitrust actions the government might take with Big Tech in the next year or so. On Twitter, Galloway was asked on Tuesday about his prediction, and said that Jassy’s promotion probably reduces the chances of that happening, while highlighting Bezos’ achievements.
“I think [a potential AWS spinoff] it’s one of the problems that Andy will have to deal with in some way, ”said Anderson, from Gartner. “This has been one of those things that has been growing over time. There are good arguments for doing both. They operate as quite independent organizations now. “
Bezos will certainly have a say in that decision, just as Gates had a say in running Microsoft until last year. It may seem unthinkable for investors to imagine Amazon without the visionary Bezos, but he could remain CEO for years, even decades, as Gates proved.
Investors should expect Jassy to be more like Microsoft’s current chief executive, Satya Nadella, than Gates’ immediate successor, Steve Ballmer, who struggled to move Microsoft into the mobile era. While Jassy tries to maneuver Amazon into its next era, Bezos will still be around to ensure it will succeed.