Amazon Begins New Chapter as Bezos Hands Over CEO Role (bloomberg.com) 69
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO on Monday, handing over the reins as the company navigates the challenges of a world fighting to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Andy Jassy, who ran Amazon's cloud-computing business, replaced Bezos, a change the company announced in February. Bezos, Amazon's biggest shareholder with a stake worth about $180 billion, will still hold sway over the company he started out of his Seattle garage in 1995. He takes over the role of executive chair, with plans to focus on new products and initiatives. Jassy takes the helm of a $1.7 trillion company that benefited greatly from the pandemic, more than tripling its profits in the first quarter of 2021 and posting record revenue as customers grew ever more dependent on online shopping. At the same time, Amazon faces activism from a restive workforce just as a rapid economic recovery causes a labor crunch that has retailers, manufacturers and other companies competing for workers with higher wages and other benefits. The company defeated an attempt by workers to unionize at an Alabama warehouse earlier this year, but faces a more formidable challenge as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters launches a broader effort to unionize Amazon workers.
Hopefully the chapter includes... (Score:2, Troll)
More congressional hearings,
breakups of Amazon,
and finally, bankruptcy.
Re: Hopefully the chapter includes... (Score:1)
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I am not an Amazon superfan, but we need to realize that they do few things right.
If they go down, who's going to replace them?
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Someone worse.
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We are a small company who does most of our business through Amazon since 2011. But we fulfill and ship the orders. The platform just connects you to me. As long as there is a way for us to connect, little changes. Amazon hasn't delivered a single order that left our building. While you may see lots of Amazon vans, just remember what I mentioned.
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So... it's Chapter 11 ?
Automate (Score:5, Interesting)
Automation is the only answer. Workers are always a pain in the ass. It's better to pay a fat tax than to have to deal with humans and their various needs. It's better to pay even double in taxes if it means you are allowed to automate. It's better to pay a tax on robots and have that tax money be given as unemployment compensation for people who would otherwise be slowing down production with their various unfair compensation requirements. Just pay them to be consumers only, for fucks sake it is better than them fucking up production. Just have them be tax-supported consumers. Win-win for everyone.
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It is on-topic because of the union troubles that were mentioned in the article.
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Automation is the only answer.
This is something that baffles me. Amazon is a $1.7T company. They have oodles of cash to invest and a huge incentive to do so, yet their operations are surprisingly manual. They should have had robots working decades ago.
How frickn' hard is it to build a robot to retrieve a box from a warehouse?
Give me a Raspberry Pi, a stereo-Arducam, some encoder-motors, and a billion dollar budget, and I could have a prototype working in a few months.
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Give me a Raspberry Pi, a stereo-Arducam, some encoder-motors, and a billion dollar budget, and I could have a prototype working in a few months.
No need. They've already got a few robots [youtube.com].
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Oh, you were being facetious. But it's still an interesting video.
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They've already got a few robots [youtube.com].
Those robots are only transporting.
The picking and packing are still being done by humans.
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Pick and pack is very hard when the same shipment might contain a box of tea, a stuffed teddy bear, a MacBook, and a bag of birdseed.
I would strongly encourage you to enter your Arduino-based pick and pack robot in one of the various competitions held every year, if you're as good as you say they'll buy you out for enough money you'll never have to work again and offer you a job if you want to keep working. I'm not being sarcastic, it's a hard problem and anyone solving it will get justifiably very rich.
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The problem is that they haven't (tried to?) enforced a robot-friendly packaging standard so that many or most product manufacturers have to adhere to. I mean, all the products you buy on amazon have different-looking packaging. How can a robot grip it, how can items be stored in a manner that it can be easily taken one by one?
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Robots can't ask questions or use common sense.
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As someone who used to work casepick in a large grocery chain (Kroger) warehouse... I can say with some certainty that such a scenario would be *much* easier said than done. Items come in shrink-wrapped on pallets, which must be forklifted, sorted, and physically located in the elaborate shelving system. Individual packages are every shape and size, they get jostled and fall out of place, and notoriously robotic retrieval/processing machines are very prone to damaging things.
And besides, robots wouldn't get
Re:Automate (Score:4, Informative)
How frickn' hard is it to build a robot to retrieve a box from a warehouse?
Extremely.
Products come in all shapes and sizes, lots of different packaging. They have to go to the right location, pick up an item from the bin, and the package it in another box for transport. They also need to inspect the item for obvious damage before sending.
Getting a robot to handle arbitrary shapes, even to just understand those shapes, is extremely hard. The solution is usually to regularize the packaging so every item is the same, but Amazon sells a wide variety of stuff from different manufacturers so that isn't possible.
While it would be possible to create standard packs that robots could handle, it's not economically viable. Packaging that takes up more than the minimum amount of space/weight increases shipping and warehousing costs.
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To add to this, someone may point out that many manufacturers do have machine vision quality control. The issue is they need massive training data for that specific item before it will work well, trained on data including rejects that never make it off the floor. Even if Amazon demanded the trained models from the manufacturers, it would have to be retrained for the lighting and optics in a hypothetical amazon inspection environment. Amazon has a continuously evolving diversity of product, and machine visi
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They've added automation in their distribution centers, but they still need lots of people, probably because the items they're packing are so varied. I expect the automation has been increasing and will continue to increase.
For deliveries, even with self-driving cars, getting the packages to doorstops is going to be incredibly challenging to automate. They've investigated using drones, and combining them with self-driving trucks might work for many deliveries. I think we're a number of years away from th
Re: Automate (Score:2)
They are going to have to force manufacturers to adhere to robot-picker friendly packaging format. Packaging that can be gripped and oriented by a robot that maybe includes a QR code that informs the robotic picker how to handle it.
Re: Automate (Score:5, Interesting)
I just keep thinking about automation, slavery, and the civil war. The first steam cars, all you need for a farm tractor, were rolling in 1770. 90+ years later, the US Civil war to abolish slavery, where slaves were mostly doing the work later to be done by tractors. Think of the trillions of dollars in economic value black Americans have produced in the last 130 years in art, entertainment, science and culture, and all the simple jobs, all because they are NOT picking cotton.
Similar for all of humanity. Brains haven't changed in 20,000 years, but all of our time was spent clawing for survival until the last few hundred. Yet once we got some free time, advancement exploded.
So theres this obvious trend here: the less people have to toil doing stupid shit, the more value and advancement they produce. Yet our whole society is based on keeping people toiling doing stupid shit in the name of jobs, when if we focused on the automation challenges and giving people free time, every precedent suggests it would pay off massively.
Exactly this. Not picking = *better* jobs (Score:2)
This is exactly right. Once upon a time must people were farmhands. Their wage was a portion of what a farmhand manually picking crops produces - very little.
In all likelihood, whatever job you do would not and did not exist without automation. If you work in IT of any kind, you job exists BECAUSE computation was automated.
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Automation is the only answer. Workers are always a pain in the ass. It's better to pay a fat tax than to have to deal with humans and their various needs.
Yeah, stupid humans and their *checks notes* desire to continue living.
Re: Automate (Score:2)
Uh you can stay alive on minimum wage quite easily.
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Do tell me how that works when you get a medical bill that's more than several years of paychecks.
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Isn't' that what Obamacare is?
Re: Automate (Score:2)
How would that happen? Obamacare exists. And do not come up with wonky scenarios. Of course there are edge cases. Even a millionaire might not be able to pay his kidnap ransom. You can access better health care on minimum wage than president Roosevelt had in 1945. Obamacare has been available for 5 or 6 years now. Besides, what happens if you do not pay your bill? Do they execute you? I said you can stay alive on minimum wage.
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You think they can afford all that on a minimum wage job?
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Afford what? Obamacare? It's free. You really believe that you cannot stay alive on $1200 a month? A loaf of bread (1000 calories) is $2. A can of sardines is $1 (supplies 500 calories and whole protein). A can of beans is $1. Basically you only require $4 a day for food (actually less, if you can cook). It's not luxury but you can stay alive. You know what, the only thing that is unaffordable on minimum wage ($1200 a month in Republican cities, $2000 per month in Democrat cities) is housing. A problem tha
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Afford what? Obamacare? It's free.
Are you truly that ignorant?
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You really shouldn't be supporting a family on your own if you have to be a minimum wage worker
Actually, the point of the minimum wage was so that you could do exactly that.
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” - President Roosevelt (1933)
The minimum wage was first imposed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and affected approximately one quarter of the work force at the time.
Your suggestion of barely existing are stupid because that's not
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Post your rent/mortgage/price of home, bills (utility, vehicle, and grocery), and income.
Re: Automate (Score:2, Informative)
Why? My point is that you can stay alive with a minimum wage job. You might have to live with roommates, live in your car, and eat beans and rice every day but you can stay alive. Or in the USA even with no job. Plenty of people have minimum wage jobs and are not dead. As for being unable to cover every possible expense. That becomes ridiculous, even a millionaire might not be able to pay for certain catastrophic things. Besides, the poor can get healthcare now (for anyone who wants it.)
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Do you have a gold medal in javelin throwing? You hurled that goalpost halfway across the city.
Bezos moving to Bangkok to hammer absinthe shots (Score:1)
Re:Quadrillionare Qunitillionare (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16, 2018 @07:22PM (#56960030)
"he cannot drink any more beer that you or I can in a single day"
I'm going to have to disagree with that.
I bumped into Jeff on a night out in Bangkok. The cunt was already wasted. After a discussion of the merits of Prime Day, we started doing Jagermeisters, one after another, after another. The fucker Would. Not. Go. Down.
I got the barkeep to open up some absinthe, in a desperate bid to slow the guy down, but he was like an elephant. He was downing those flaming shots of absinthe quick as a cheetah on crack.
He turned around with a big shit-eating grin on his face, and said the words I would never forget :"Your turn, motherfucker"
I took one shot of absinthe, and projectile vomited all over a nearby ladyboy, who proceeded to kick the shit out of me.
Although this is only anecdotal evidence, it is my opinion that Jeff Bezos CAN drink more beer than you or I - far more.
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
Re: Bezos moving to Bangkok to hammer absinthe sho (Score:1, Insightful)
On Redshit, they would say "/r/thathappened", before waving their blue hair to the side.
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Who does shots of absinthe...what a waste!
Absinthe should be diluted with water and *savored*.
Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
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In a publicly-traded company your status as founder, CEO, head of the board, or president doesn't mean shit if you don't control a 51% share. The instant that dips below 51% you can bet money every shareholder will conspire against you to have you removed in the name of profit.
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Clause Blocking Blue Origin? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Clause Blocking Blue Origin? (Score:1)
You underestimate the little boy/girl in every grown-up.
It's exactly because it's not rational but emotional that this would make sense.
That being said, I too think this is rather unlikely.
But not because Bezos having some childish triggers would be so infathomable.
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It's all speculation until he says something, but one of my companies favorite execs retired when she requested a particular week off that was significant to her and was asked to rearrange for the convenience of the company, and she decided that she could afford to retire 'any day now', so why not then. A random event that she would've caved on throughout most of her career, but was the straw to have her finally pull the cord, with the money she had and health enough to actually enjoy life still.
Being told
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He's the kind of CEO who can rewrite his own contract if he wants to.
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He stepped down so that he could have more time to devote to BO. Or at least I presume he's going to, and not just fuck off to a yacht. The ride is an afterthought; his exit from Amazon has been planned for months, and the FAA only recently gave permission. And it's none too soon, because BO is a mess. Jeff was basically throwing a billion dollars a year at it with minimal oversight. For all that he's got a ~20-year-old space company that still hasn't put so much as a pebble into orbit. Even Richard Branson
The Founder's Dilemma (Score:5, Interesting)
Every would-be entrepreneur wants to be a Bill Gates, a Phil Knight, or an Anita Roddick, each of whom founded a large company and led it for many years. However, successful CEO-cum-founders are a very rare breed. When I analyzed 212 American start-ups that sprang up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I discovered that most founders surrendered management control long before their companies went public. By the time the ventures were three years old, 50% of founders were no longer the CEO; in year four, only 40% were still in the corner office; and fewer than 25% led their companies’ initial public offerings. Other researchers have subsequently found similar trends in various industries and in other time periods. We remember the handful of founder-CEOs in corporate America, but they’re the exceptions to the rule.
We're all guilty of it. Just because we excel in one particular arena intellectually, we assume our superior intelligence means we're good at other things and sometimes everything. It's just not fracking true, is it?
On a basic level, many tradesman, skilled AF in their craft, eventually go into business for themselves. Only a few succeed, due to the fact that only a percentage of them are good businessmen and good tradesmen. Not oddly, at all, being a good plumber doesn't make you good with money.
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A lot of successful tradesmen I know are actually husband wife teams. The wife answers the phone, schedules jobs and estimates, does billing, etc. The husband is the tradesman. More women are coming into trades nowadays, but for whatever reasons, a lot of tradesmen right now are men. I am not saying that is how it should be or always will be. This comment isn't meant to be about that.
It just kind of bolsters your point that some people who are good at a trade may still need help from someone who is good at
Re:The Founder's Dilemma (Score:4, Informative)
Here is his work history before Amazon: "After graduating (Princeton), he put his skills to work on Wall Street, where by 1990 he had risen to be a senior vice president at investment firm DE Shaw. But about four years later he surprised peers by leaving his high-paid position, backed by money borrowed from his parents, to open an online bookseller called Amazon.com."
The man is a businessman through and through. He did study engineering in school and perhaps without the more lucrative draw of business, he might have been a fine engineer, but we'll never know.
I think Zuckerberg's ongoing role as CEO of Facebook is way, way more susprising.
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Basically, it's luck.
His last words before leaving: (Score:5, Funny)
"I have to go now. My planet needs me. [geekwire.com]"
Natural evolution... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a natural evolution of any company that eventually the charismatic founder hands the reins to someone else once the writing is on the wall that the glory days are over. The successor serves the vital corporate interest of bag-holder or scapegoat for the accumulated but not yet discovered transgressions of the founder.
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Jassy has taken AWS from "Let's try this" to the single division that brings in so much money that Amazon had to pay dividends. I personally think he's a good choice, he's much more methodical than Bezos, but when you employ over a million people that's needed. You're not going to see dramatic changes, he's not dumb enough to mess with what works, but I don't think you'll see the off-the-wall bad ideas like the Fire Phone any more either.
Is it a coincidence? (Score:3)
New CEO is "Andy Jassy" and he is of course a (Score:2)
Everyone knew that the tribe always bands together against the non-tribe. Tribesman Jeff Bezos of course hands over his company to Andy Jassy, another tribesman.
Wikipedia Early Life strikes again. But anyone who paid only a little attention in the last 10 years knew this long before even looking it up.