Jeff Bezos relinquishing the CEO’s post at Amazon — the company he founded and began operating out of a Seattle garage in 1994 — to Andy Jassy perhaps highlights the future path of the company.
More focus on Cloud computing?
Andy Jassy is presently the CEO of Amazon Web Service. The company’s Cloud business comprises a massive chunk of the company’s earnings. In fact, AWS outages can take down swaths of the Internet for hours.
It’s interesting to note that Andy Jassy becoming the next CEO of Amazon is reflective of the rise of Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who was also an integral part of the Bill Gates-founded company’s cloud and server business before taking charge as CEO.
Besides AWS, Jassy is a familiar face in the Amazon family. He joined in 1997 and then led the Amazon Web Services team since it was founded in 2003 and was named the CEO of AWS in 2016.
Andy Jassy Sourced by the correspondent
Meteoric growth
With Bezos set to become executive chairman of Amazon’s board, it means he will be a little more removed from the day-to-day business of running the nearly $1.7 trillion company. But he will be able to focus more on his other big projects, including the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origins (his aerospace firm) and The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013.
Since the days of being an online bookseller, Bezos expanded his company in different directions — selling millions of different items, became a logistics giant, upended the retail industry, entered streaming entertainment and came up with AI- powered devices.
Before the pandemic, he had taken a step back but in 2020 he had to handle a flood of e-commerce demand and labour unrest.
In the footsteps of…
Bezos is not the first person to have moved away from being CEO. Larry Ellison at Oracle stepped aside in 2014. Bill Gates at Microsoft did the same in 2000 after an antitrust ruling. Larry Page moved away from being Alphabet’s CEO, handing over the reins to Sundar Pichai in 2019.
