The links below are to articles reporting on Jeff Bezos stepping down as CEO of Amazon.
For more visit:
– https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-to-step-down-as-amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-to-take-over-in-q3.html–
https://goodereader.com/blog/business-news/jeff-bezos-is-stepping-down-as-ceo-of-amazon
Louise Grimmer, University of Tasmania; Gary Mortimer, Queensland University of Technology, and Martin Grimmer, University of Tasmania
Jeff Bezos has announced he will stand down as chief executive of Amazon in the third quarter of 2021. The founder of the online retail behemoth will hand the reins to Andy Jassy, who currently leads Amazon’s cloud computing wing.
The announcement comes after an enormously successful 2020 for Amazon despite (or perhaps because of) the COVID-19 pandemic, with operating cashflow up 72% from the previous year to US$66.1 billion, and net sales increasing 35% to US$386.1 billion.
Amazon has its share of detractors, with critics highlighting concerns around working conditions, tax minimisation, anti-competitive practices and privacy. But its enormous size and continuing phenomenal growth make it a force to be reckoned with.
How did Amazon get to this position, and what does the future hold under new leadership?
Almost 27 years ago, in 1994, Bezos left his job as a senior vice-president for a hedge fund and started an online bookstore in his garage. At the time, using the internet for retail was in its infancy.
Bezos decided that books were an ideal product to sell online. Originally the new business was named Cadabra, but Bezos soon changed it to Amazon and borrowed US$300,000 from his parents to get things off the ground.
Read more:
Amazon is turning 25 – here’s a look back at how it changed the world
Books proved popular with growing numbers of online buyers, and Bezos began to add other products and services to the Amazon inventory – most notably e-readers, tablets and other devices. Today Amazon predominantly makes its revenue through retail, web services and subscriptions.
Amazon is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, valued at more than US$1.7 trillion. That’s more than the GDP of all but 10 of the world’s countries. It’s also the largest employer among tech companies by a large margin.
The key to Amazon’s dominance has been constant expansion. After moving into e-readers and tablets, it extended more broadly into technology products and services.
The expansion has not yet stopped, and Amazon’s product lines now include media (books, DVDs, music), kitchen and dining wares, toys and games, fashion, beauty products, gourmet food and groceries, home improvement and gardening, sporting goods, medications and pharmaceuticals, financial services and more.
More recently Amazon has expanded into bricks-and-mortar, heralded by its purchase of the Whole Foods chain in 2017, the creation of its own high tech stores such as Amazon Go, and its sophisticated distribution and delivery services such as Amazon Prime.
Read more:
Fear not, shoppers: Amazon’s Australian geoblock won’t cramp your style
Amazon has become increasingly vertically integrated, meaning it no longer simply sells others’ product but makes and sells its own. This gives the company a position of extreme market dominance.
Amazon is hugely popular with customers, but has attracted criticism from supplier advocates, workers unions and governments.
Industrial relations matters, such as fair wages, unsafe work practices and unrealistic demands, appear the most common area of concern. A 2019 UK report found:
Amazon have no policy on living wage and make no mention of wages being enough to cover workers’ basic needs in their supplier code.
Other concerns relate to alleged unsafe working conditions and “whistleblower” policies.
In March 2020, as COVID-19 began to take hold, workers claimed they were fired for voicing concerns about safe working conditions. Amazon vice president and veteran engineer Tim Bray resigned in solidarity and nine US senators issued an open letter to Bezos, seeking clarity around the sackings.
More general criticisms of the company culture have surfaced over the years, relating to insufficient work breaks, unrealistic demands, and annual “cullings” of the staff – referred to as “purposeful Darwinism”.
Another strand of criticism relates to Amazon’s market size and antitrust laws. Antitrust laws exist to stop big companies creating monopolies. Amazon presents a challenge, as it is a manufacturer, an online retailer, and a marketplace where other retailers can sell products to consumers.
Privacy concerns have also plagued Amazon products like Echo smart speakers, Ring home cameras, and Amazon One palm-scanning ID checkers.
Read more:
Amazon Echo’s privacy issues go way beyond voice recordings
Finally, the amount of company tax Amazon pays in Australia has been brought into question. The company has used a range of tactics to legally reduce the income taxes it pays around the world.
What will change at Amazon when Bezos steps down? We’re unlikely to see a dramatic shift in the short term. For one thing, Bezos is not departing entirely – he will stay involved as “executive chairman”. For another, his successor, Andy Jassy, has been with Amazon since 1997.
Jassy is the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and already one of the most important people in the tech industry. AWS has been at the forefront of simplifying computing services, driving the cloud computing revolution and influencing how organisations purchase technology.
Jassy’s long history, intimate knowledge of the organisation, and technological expertise will no doubt stand Amazon in good stead.
However, he faces a monumental undertaking. Jassy will inherit responsibility for more than a million employees, selling millions of different products and services.
His expertise in AI and machine learning at AWS will be increasingly important as these play a greater role in Amazon’s operations – for everything from optimising warehouses and giving better search results to business forecasting and monitoring warehouse staff and delivery drivers.
The physical lockdowns and online acceleration driven by the COVID-19 pandemic provided the ideal conditions for a company that has been called “the everything store”. Supporters and critics will watch with interest to see if this is still true in a post-COVID environment.
Louise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Retail Marketing, University of Tasmania; Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology, and Martin Grimmer, Professor of Marketing, University of Tasmania
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The link below is to an interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
For more visit:
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12
“The book industry is in better shape than it ever has been and it’s due to ebooks,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told an audience on Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview that addressed the company’s drone plans, its campus culture and its indifference to pain of short-term shareholders.
Speaking at a BusinessInsider event in New York, Bezos downplayed [company]Amazon’s[/company] recent high-profile spat with publisher Hachette as a run-of-the-mill fight with a supplier, adding that it’s the essential job of any retailer to fight for the best price for its customers.
As for the publishing industry and its authors, Bezos argued that $30 is too high a price for books, and that lower prices will lead to more readers, which will in turn benefit everyone. And in a remark that may have been intended to head off antitrust arguments, he urged people to consider book prices in the context of a larger entertainment market.
“Books don’t…
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Most of the Twitter response to Amazon(s amzn) CEO Jeff Bezos’ star turn on 60 Minutes focused on Amazon’s plans to offer drone delivery of small packages in the not-too-far-off-but-unspecified future.
Bezos showed off the small helicopter like devices, actually octocopters, to the always credulous Charlie Rose and no doubt they are cool — although you have to wonder what could possibly go wrong. This meaty tidbit reaffirms what Gigaom’s Signe Brewster reported earlier, that consumer drones are coming and nothing screams “consumer” like Amazon’s retail services.
Still, the biggest surprise for me came when Bezos, unprompted, referred to the planned cloud that Amazon Web Services is building for the CIA as a private cloud. He didn’t even stumble on the word. Funny, since at AWS Re:invent last month, top AWS execs Andy Jassy and Adam Selipsky went to great pains to not characterize that installment as a private cloud. That’s…
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Like a visiting dignitary from another world, Amazon (s amzn) CEO Jeff Bezos descended on the Washington Post newsroom on Wednesday to meet with editors and reporters at the newspaper he recently acquired for $250 million, and by most accounts the reaction from the somewhat shell-shocked staff was surprisingly positive. That could have something to do with the fact that Bezos didn’t sound at all like the tech warlord out to gut the newsroom and get everyone to produce more slideshows — in fact, he said he prefers a printed newspaper to a digital one, and he also believes that readers will pay for a “daily bundle” of news on a tablet.
The Amazon founder made a number of other points that probably sat well with the Post‘s journalists, including the idea that the paper’s primary focus should be on readers and not advertisers, and that catering to…
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Like many other observers and analysts, I responded to Amazon (s amzn) CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post by jumping in with some free advice on a turnaround strategy — a list of five things I thought he should do to try and reimagine what a newspaper needs to be in a digital age. One of those suggestions in particular has triggered a barrage of criticism: namely, the idea that the Post should shut down its printing presses. But that is the step I think may actually be the most crucial — and at the same time, the hardest to take.
The reason why it would be hard is partly financial. As Ryan Chittum has pointed out at the Columbia Journalism Review — and as others have pointed out to me on Twitter — there is a very real cost to shutting down the print version of a…
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The link below is to what is probably to be regarded as old news now and that is that Jeff Bezos (the Founder of Amazon) has bought The Washington Post for $250 million dollars.
For more visit:
http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/jeff-bezos-buys-the-washington-post-for-250-million_b39317
The link below is to an article that contains an interview with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Kindle. This article makes for an interesting read and is well worth a look.
For more visit:
Jeff Bezos Interview
At the BookShelf 