I am shocked Amazon stock in after hours is actually up on this news. I would have expected Bezos stepping down as CEO would be a negative.
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#372It 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 announceme…
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.
It buys you time. You tell the antitrust: give us a few more months, we'll find a new CEO and then spin out the company. IMHO.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that America is a terrible example of government and governing, and that you shouldn't be using it as a comparison in your argument. Good government is hard, but it's certainly better than a corporation that is legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.
Corporations are not legally obligated to put profit ahead of everything else. That's a bad myth that refuses to die. There is absolutely no substance to that claim. There is no legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.
I don't know of anyone claiming it's a legal obligation. It's a natural obligation, and it's worse.
The shareholders want profit maximised, and with that end, decide upon the board of directors, who decide upon the CEO. If the CEO does not maximise profits, the CEO will not remain the CEO. Therefore, the CEOs of (publicly-traded) companies are obliged to maximise profits – those who do not feel such an obligation are not CEOs.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#374Wow. 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…
By his words[1] it was because books had a large possible inventory, allowing him to build a store larger than any one physical store could manage.
Though i imagine a lot of reasons justified books.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that the customer experience of Amazon has declined dramatically in the last few years. Maybe there should be more internal viewings of that video.
Might be hard to change anything when you have a core metric that looks like this: https://www.google.ca/search?q=amazon&tbm=fin
Link is broken.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#376> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia: > Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and othe…
Upvoted; and thanks for sharing these details. They might be obvious for you, but I had only a limited knowledge of all that innovation happening at Bell Labs.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#377From 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…
Another thing I find interesting is that Amazon's main business is so common that there's a single word for it: retail. They're just yet another middleman between distributors and consumers. Not long ago, a lot of the business world thought Walmart was the indisputable retail king. Amazon proved there's still room for growth in retail. Will this simple thing called retail produce yet more trillion dollar companies, o…
Some companies are moving towards selling directly to consumers, especially if they have a brand to protect. Nike is pulling back from retail a bit and focusing on their own website and app to promote and sell their products.
The flip side is Amazon has empowered a lot of smaller manufacturers to get nearly direct access to consumers. Especially Chinese firms but even some small American companies have benefitted from the huge base of customers Amazon gives them access too.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
no need to set a max. Just set the marginal rate so high that earning (or, if a wealth tax, owning) more than some amount becomes pointless.
And disincentivize people from working? That's not a sustainable economic system. For a properly sustainable system, consider how Islam solved this problem over 1400 years ago. Zakat is the only form of "tax" if you will that is mandated. Interest and other predatory practices are prohibited (e.g. shorting). Once the fundamentals are correct, everything else naturally falls into place. It has been reported that durin…
One might argue that having $1B of assets (certainly liquid assets) is a fairly major disincentive to working.
High marginal tax rates on super-high levels of income and/or wealth doesn't discourage working. It just makes doing something to add another chunk to your income/wealth require something other than financial renumeration. There's plenty of evidence that humans do their best work when they have intrinsic and not extrinsic motivation.
Bezos is a case in point. I believe him to have an almost absurdly high level of intrinsic motivation (I worked with him for 15 months). He might like the wealth he has, but the things he will continue to do with his life, just like Amazon itself, get done for reasons beyond money.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#379I’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.)
Big difference: Andy Jassy is an execution machine, AND has a really good sense of vision and strategy. AND has worked at Amazon for ~25 years.
Source: my humble opinion, and I worked at AWS and met him several times.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Make your case instead of dropping your groupthink everywhere. Why? And: What is the maximum size a corporation should be allowed to grow? Who gives that permission now?
Well, one way to think about it is to consider what the effect of the growth might be. What good is a corporation doing getting that large? Who benefits from the amassing of so much wealth? Are they acting for the benefit of many people, or are they more like a black hole -- mindlessly absorbing money and growing over time? Certainly if a corporation can grow to get so large, it's hard to argue against it. It becomes…
So far, people seem to be benefitting from Amazon.