The Washington Post – by Jay Greene, Tony Romm
“If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive,” Bezos said in an earnings release Tuesday.
Under Bezos’s stewardship, Amazon evolved from an upstart online bookseller into one of the world’s most popular Internet marketplaces able to quickly deliver a vast catalogue of products and services. Bezos’s creation helped set in motion a massive change in the way people around the world shop, as people began buying toothpaste to car parts to groceries on their PCs and phones. Amazon also triggered a sea change in physical retail, accelerating the shuttering of shopping malls and stores. That shift has only accelerated as the coronavirus pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping as worried customers shunned stores.
To make the e-commerce business run, Amazon had to create an array of computer data centers, stacked with rows upon rows of servers, to make sure the online marketplace could handle the growing business. That developed into a new market for the company, Amazon Web Services, a giant, profit-driving cloud computing operation that now powers websites around the world.
The company‘s meteoric growth delivered massive riches to shareholders and made Bezos — depending on the day — the richest man on the planet. For all the praise on Wall Street, however, Bezos and his brass-knuckled tactics also carried great cost. Regulators increasingly viewed Amazon as a threat to competition, and the company’s own workers at times told grim tales about their mistreatment, as they sought to carry out Bezos’s mission to create a consumer-first “everything store.” Amazon for years faced fierce criticism for underpaying workers, only to boost its minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018. It came under fire at the beginning of the pandemic for what workers said was a lack of precautions. It’s fighting an aggressive union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse, where employees are pressing for better working conditions and higher pay.
Bezos, who turned 57 last month, set up the transition to Jassy last summer, when the company announced that one of his possible successors, Jeff Wilke, would soon retire. That paved the way for Jassy to take the CEO job.
To Tom Alberg, a venture capitalist and longtime Amazon director who stepped down from the board two years ago, Jassy was the obvious choice.
“Andy has lived his whole life in that culture, and that culture is so strong,” Alberg said.
Jassy’s Amazon career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market, cloud computing, a business the company has come to dominate just as aggressively as it leads in the world of e-commerce. And the fact that Jassy now succeeds Bezos offers insight into Amazon: that the company still values high-risk, high-reward bets and is less defined by online shopping than some might think.
Jassy joined the company in 1997 after graduating from Harvard Business School. At the time, Amazon had only a few hundred employees and had just gone public. The executive pioneered the company’s entry into music sales, Amazon’s first push outside books. In the early 2000s, Jassy shadowed Bezos as his technical assistant, something of a chief-of-staff role. And he helped launch AWS, which upended the software industry with its ability to rent space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations on Amazon’s vast array of servers.
Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-stepping-down-amazon-ceo-transitioning-executive-chair-role/
He was arrested ….human trafficking