Amazon Begins New Chapter as Bezos Hands Over CEO Role (bloomberg.com) 33
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:3)
More congressional hearings,
breakups of Amazon,
and finally, bankruptcy.
Re: Hopefully the chapter includes... (Score:1)
Automate (Score:4, 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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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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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:4, 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.
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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.
Re: Bezos moving to Bangkok to hammer absinthe sho (Score:1)
On Redshit, they would say "/r/thathappened", before waving their blue hair to the side.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Clause Blocking Blue Origin? (Score:4, 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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He's the kind of CEO who can rewrite his own contract if he wants to.
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The Founder's Dilemma (Score:4, 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
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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 perha
His last words before leaving: (Score:3, Funny)
"I have to go now. My planet needs me. [geekwire.com]"
Natural evolution... (Score:2)
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.
Is it a coincidence? (Score:2)