It’s time for Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos to take his turn as a founder / senior statesman – like the Wizard of Oz, often unseen but with seemingly omnipotent control – while the head of Amazon’s cloud computing arm take the lead.
The change at the top won’t change much about Amazon AMZN,
but it could affect the most crucial choice the company faces: whether Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com remain under one roof.
While Bezos is often compared to Apple Inc. AAPL,
co-founder Steve Jobs, his departure from the role of CEO is more like passing the batons of technology CEO legends 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 the president of the e-commerce giant he founded in the early days of the dot-com bubble.
Just as Page handed over the reins to the leader of its most profitable division, Sundar Pichai – first as CEO of Google and then Alphabet – Bezos identified Andy Jassy from the company’s largest profit generator, Amazon Web Services. Addressing his post-CEO ambitions, Bezos sounded more like Gates on Tuesday, who continued to build one of the world’s largest nonprofits.
“We’ve never had more energy and it’s not about retirement,” Bezos said in an email to employees detailing plans for the nonprofit Bezos Earth Fund, the construction of missiles at Blue Origin and his ownership of the Washington Post. “I am very passionate 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, such as the acquisition of Whole Foods.
“Jeff has always been involved in this, and that’s where we’ll keep our time focused,” Olsavsky told analysts at the company’s earnings call.
That will not really mean an external and probably an internal change. These kinds of big swings seemed to be the things Bezos focused on for a long time, while leaving the day-to-day management to the lieutenants. In recent years, Bezos has been less of a public face of Amazon, amid close attention to his growing wealth, commercial space race and recent status as a media mogul. He does not participate in quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street and instead writes an annual shareholders’ letter and chairs Amazon’s annual general meeting. More recently, his public appearances have ranged from elite technology conferences, when they were one more thing, to congressional testimony in recent antitrust congressional hearings.
“Bezos is not as visible as some CEOs, it will be interesting to see if Andy takes another tact,” said Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “Andy was the visible spokesman for AWS. It will be interesting to see if he takes this with Amazon as well. ”
Read also: Future CEO Andy Jassy helped build the Amazon cloud
Jassy will also have to prove capable of running more than AWS, which is a critical part of Amazon, but nowhere near the scope of the entire company.
“I’m a digital trade, I’m a grocery store, I’m a truck company, I’m in shipping, warehousing and production. They have a lot of people in their ecosystem, a lot of blue-collar workers, they were the biggest employer in the pandemic. A lot of things are happening, ”said Daniel Newman, senior analyst at Futurum Research.
“Andy literally prototyped his ability to lead Amazon through his work at AWS,” Neman added.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks during the AWS re: Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas.
Associated Press
One issue Jassy may face when he becomes CEO at the end of this year is the biggest question about AWS: will he remain part of Amazon? Jassy worked at AWS from the beginning and was his strongest vocal supporter, so it seems unlikely that he would choose to separate him from the company he now runs.
Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University School of Business, predicted in a recent book that Amazon could drop the deal, possibly to remove any antitrust action the government may take with Big Tech next year or so. so. On Twitter, Galloway was asked on Tuesday about his predictions and said that promoting Jassy is likely to reduce the chances of this happening, while highlighting Bezos’ achievements.
“I guess [a potential AWS spinoff] it’s one of the issues that Andy will have to deal with in some way, “said Anderson Gartner. “It simply came to our notice then. There are good arguments for doing both. They operate as fairly independent organizations right now. ”
Bezos will certainly have his say in this decision, just as Gates had a say in Microsoft until last year. It may seem unimaginable for investors to imagine Amazon without the visionary Bezos, but he could remain executive president for years, even decades, as Gates proved.
Investors should hope that Jassy looks more like Microsoft’s current CEO Satya Nadella than Gates’ immediate successor, Steve Ballmer, who struggled to move Microsoft into the mobile age. While Jassy tries to maneuver Amazon into its next era, Bezos will still be around to make sure he succeeds.