It was public knowledge that Bezos stopped running Amazon day-to-day a while ago. It was headed by the two execs under him (Andy Jassy for AWS and Jeff Wilke for retail). Jassy even had the CEO (of AWS) title. With Wilke announcing his retirement a few months ago, Jassy was the clear frontrunner to take over from Bezos. In hindsight I guess Wilke retired because Jassy was picked over him. The timing of the announcement is unexpected, but nothing else.
That does tell us something about the corporate structure though - whilst a lot of people think AWS would be better off being spun out, there's no way you hire the head of AWS as CEO of Amazon if you think that's the direction forward.
Their fast growing ad network can be seen as a conflict worth splitting out.
Probably similar or maybe even clearer than Google since more people understand a store selling their own products than Google owning every single step (with huge non transparent and evidently according to TX colluded margins) in the ad transaction, in addition to all the user data, and their own products.
In a way that's the case with every company. Each part is more valuable on it's own, unless it's more valuable together with another part. :P
btw, it looks like you have some sort of shadowban. I don't see any terrible comments among your last 20 or so, so you might want to ask @dang if he can look into your case.
My mental image is that people want to spin off AWS for society’s benefits because Amazon grew too big and abuses the integration. Amazon squarely resisting this idea seems uncontroversal.
People argue companies like Walmart don't want to pay their rival Amazon for cloud hosting, but the truth is if AWS is the best cloud provider, it makes business sense to go with them
At the scale Walmart operates - 25th largest GDP in the world if considered as a nation[1], supporting over 2.2 Million employees[2], in over 27 countries[3] - it's simply more cost effective to do your tech in-house.
Amazon is huge... but Walmart is truly massive... over double Amazon's size in just about every metric. They clearly have the resources to handle things on their own.
It's a matter of corporate strategy... Amazon is like a combination of different entities, one of which is AWS, and AWS arguably does cloud better than anyone else
Walmart doesn't have the same capabilities. Being larger doesn't mean they can do it.
Was in the industry for a stint, and the issue was not only about money going to Amazon. There was a serious fear for their usage data to be used as a window into their business (if not fear of more illegal and unethical access to their data)
The case of Amazon using internal market place data to guide their own product strategy has already been made over and over, so the precedent exists.
They do, as far as I know Microsoft has a pretty good hold on retail. Some go with GCP but Google is less “enterprisy” for their taste in a lot of ways.
Been part of some of those conversations, some companies are wary of hosting with Amazon not due to paying their competitor but due to the amount of power they are putting on a direct competitor hands.
Has the government filed an antitrust suit against Amazon? It could take half a decade to go from filing to a (potential) final appeal at the Supreme Court.
Yes, a bit of shakeup at the top. Jassy now CEO, Dave Clark stepping into Jeff Wilke's role as head of retail. I assume Charlie Bell will step up as head of AWS.
Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS
Thing is, cbell doesn't make it personal (in any of the calls I've seen). It's about raising the bar. He demands quality, and he gets it. His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point. They think ripping into people is the goal.
I've got a project this year that I'm told is on his radar. I'm not terrified. I'm excited, because it means I have to deliver the best I am capable of and I'll get help to do it.
> His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point
couldn't agree more. Almost every day of the week now with AWS, org, service, and team level ops meetings, and most of them miss the forest for the trees
Like you, I don't think those meetings were particularly brutal but merely kept plain and honest, and more importantly, were of great learning value besides being a fantastic demonstration of leadership by cbell.
It's funny how differently people respond to that type of stuff.
I grew up playing pretty competitive sports. Being ripped apart in front of my peers was a once a week occurrence for me for most of my life. I had no interest in doing it to anyone else, but it didn't seem like a big deal, and didn't bother me much.
My first job was at a company where it happened a lot. I didn't realize how toxic it was until I started talking with co-workers who were having panic attacks from it.
Yep. Not sports here, but military. I will take a dressing down, public or otherwise, over office politics and some of the corporate shenanigans that I have encountered in my private sector career. Give it to me straight, let me know how bad I fucked up, and what we can do to fix it, or walk me out the door.
That said, I also understand that this doesn't work for alot of people.
Same for me. My high school and college hockey coaches could really let you have it. They never pulled you aside and did it in private either. My college coach had episodes that would make even Bobby Knight look like a pussycat. He once had a roll-on-the-floor grappling fight with a teammate in the locker room between periods. (Coach had a big tactical advantage: he wasn't wearing skates) When I ended up working on a trading desk the impromptu performance review broadsides -- in front of everyone -- felt very familiar.
It's actually a rare opportunity that someone smart can "rip me apart" for the right reason. Candid truth does not hurt. It stimulates growth. In contrast, the worst place is where everyone is nice, but does not tell you what you have done wrong.
Candid truths can be shared in blameless postmortems and a hundred other ways. An executive shouting at someone in a large meeting is an ego trip, nothing more.
As someone who has been on these calls multiple times, I think "rip someone apart" was an attempt to portray the bluntness with which feedback was provided but (as other commenters have mentioned) not to import any ad hominem attack characteristics to the feedback. Although admittedly the language used was contrary to that. While Amazon certainly has its flaws and has plenty of room to grow in the hospitable work environment category, cbell's feedback on weekly calls is not one of those areas imo.
Blameless is often pointless because sometimes something about the person is the problem. If the project failed because Bob ran it and Bob is too risk averse, then you can't fix it without talking about Bob. Bob either needs to figure out how to be less risk averse (hard and time consuming journey) or Bob shouldn't run projects that require risk taking.
Doesn't mean Bob is bad or gets fired, but he is part of the picture.
The whole blameless thing is so weak - if there's something about you that caused the failure, don't you want to know?
The key mental shift (for me anyway) is that if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed. You need to design a better system when the flaw in the system is the people. What that often looks like is changing/instituting processes such that quantitative measure (metrics, checklists, etc) governs decisions (thereby removing much, but importantly not all, of the human element), or you design processes in such a way that one person is not in charge of making the decision (the "two person rule", CRs, leadership approval). There are of course other tools but these two are pretty common in my experience.
> if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed.
That just means that the person who designed the system deserves the blame.
I'm only half-joking here. You can't just rely on the "system" – someone needs to be responsible, either for the decision or for creating the system that makes the decision.
Having a system/process is not about removing accountability, it's about reducing discretion/cognitive load where it's been identified as risky. In fact, having a system/process in place to point to and say "this individual did not follow the steps/process/rules" makes an unbiased conversation about their performance much more possible.
Yes and this works when you're doing something for the 10th time. It totally doesn't work when you're doing something innovative and risky, which I assume is the kinds of conversations we're talking about here (this subthread is contextual to a senior amazon exec, he's probably not PMing someone forgetting to change the backup tapes)
If your root cause analysis leads to a preventative fix that amounts to “humans should not make mistake X” you haven’t done anything to prevent recurrence.
I listen to the calls weekly. No one shouts. No one degraded others. Cbell's power is that he doesn't have an ego in these calls.
The blameless postmortems are reviewed in these meetings, and the findings challenged, to ensure they really got to the root cause and lessons are learned.
I once almost got to present my post mortem, but it wasn't high enough priority that week. I wish it had been. It would have been ripped apart, but I would have gotten the feedback from the smartest people in the company on how to make my system better.
AWS support is pretty great in my experience. That’s with a paid plan, but I consider it great even for a paid plan. Typically instant chat with someone who can usually fix it is a game changer.
I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect free support for such a technical product to be as good as that for the retail site.
Nah, its just that you'll have to change your perspective of customer support. Any questions will be answered in 5 days by pointing to the FAQ and each response will take an additional 5 days. If fact, you'll probably find the answer yourself before support helps you. Finally, the feedback mechanism will be so generic as to be useless.
Unless you want to pay 10% of your order for expedited service. Then those days drop from 5 to 3.
