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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#111

Post by personjerry »

munificent wrote: post #106
ksec wrote: post #66

From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…

For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

Why?

Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#112

Post by dhnajsjdnd »

mssundaram wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he’ll take a cue from Bill Gates and get involved in philanthropy. Alternatively he might get more involved in Blue Origin?

Perhaps Bill Gates truly has developed compassion for the less fortunate, however moving his money into the foundation is a very convenient tax strategy, and I suspect he enjoys the challenges and influence he has, and less so the warm fuzzies from helping people. (I anticipate this comment will not go over well, as it seems I must just not see the truth that Bill Gates is a perfectly benevolent being who has ascende…

I think there’s a common misunderstanding about how tax write-offs work. If you donate x dollars, and your marginal tax rate is t, you end up losing x - xt dollars. That means you have less money than if you didn’t donate, even after accounting for the write-off. Arguments that somebody only donated money for the tax write-off usually don’t make sense.

Possibles exceptions to this include hard-to-value assets like art, where someone could potentially exaggerate the value by at least 1/t to defraud the tax authorities, but this doesn’t seem relevant to donating publicly-traded Microsoft stock. Bill Gates would be richer if he didn’t make these donations.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#113

Post by jimbob45 »

ianai wrote: post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

What is it you perceive that happened to MS? They appear to be doing well and are the top competitor to Amazon's AWS.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#114

Post by somethoughts »

It will be interesting to watch how Andy Jassy as head of AWS (dealing with building out data centers, SW partnerships, API uptime, negotiating with Intel, designing Graviton CPUs, etc.) will be able to transition to such things as Prime Video content licensing discussions and goal setting for Whole Foods and the nuances of warehouse distribution labor disputes.

As a founder of Amazon - having built Amazon from nothing, Bezos probably had certain in-built persona and gravitas which probably helped with leadership talent acquisition and vision setting in all domains of the business universe. The opportunity to report to Jeff Bezos was probably a huge selling point - no matter what industry you were coming from.

Its interesting Amazon never attempted to give Andy Jassy a trial run as a public facing COO running both sides of the house.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#116

Post by orev »

jl2718 wrote: post #80
ww520 wrote: post #22

Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.

Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store…

Shipping books was/is one of the cheapest things to ship, as they need minimal packaging, and the USPS offers a special media mail rate. This allowed him to work out all the logistics behind the scenes, and then make incremental improvements to handle other products.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#117

Post by riversflow »

wiremine wrote: post #63

Crazy, he's one of those guys that you think will just be at the top forever. Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook transition was for Apple.

> Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook transition was for Apple.

I like Apple, but there is quite a seam with the Jobs/Cook transition. That seam is the overly minimalistic industrial design patterns witnessed in the butterfly keyboard, vanishing ports, trashcan Mac, etc. They seem to finally be coming around on this.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#118

Post by airstrike »

munificent wrote: post #106
ksec wrote: post #66

From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…

For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

Ok, I'll bite. Why? It's not like there's some natural law against it, so you need to provide an argument for why you think they shouldn't.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#119

Post by boringg »

ksec wrote: post #66

From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…

I imagine he's pretty burnt out of running the day to day. Time for something new after 2 decades. Love or hate Amazon it has been a force on the planet.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#120

Post by ses1984 »

Jonnax wrote: post #13

" Amazon is also announcing today that Jeff Bezos will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021 and Andy Jassy will become Chief Executive Officer at that time. “Amazon is what it is because of invention. We do crazy things together and then make them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the…

Out of all those things the only two uniquely amazon are cloud computing and fast shipping.
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