That belief about the future of the internet proved prescient. “If you believe companies will build applications from scratch on top of the infrastructure services if the right selection existed, and we believed they would if the right selection existed, then the operating system becomes the internet, which is really different from what had been the case for the 30 years,” Jassy explained. “The operating system becomes the internet.” The company’s early investments paid off, as it took competitors years to realize the business opportunity and launch comparable cloud products.
“In retrospect it seems fairly obvious, but at the time I don’t think we had ever really internalized that,” Jassy said at re:Invent. It took Amazon another six years of exploring and experimenting - with the effort to formally develop AWS really taking off after a fateful 2003 executive retreat at Bezos’ house, Jassy recounted - before the company launched its first cloud product in 2006. “So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare,” Jassy told a crowd at the re:Invent conference in 2018, according to TechCrunch. The company set out to improve them by creating easier-to-use APIs and other technology that would let any one team at Amazon pull from a common pool of resources. It was Jassy who helped identify the problem: Amazon’s development tools, frankly, sucked. The idea came from Amazon’s own struggles to build an external development platform for retailers three years earlier, so third-party companies could build their own e-commerce operations. The goal was to see whether it made sense for Amazon to offer hosting services to other websites and businesses, back when many of the largest tech companies mainly relied on third-party data centers or had already begun looking into or actively building their own. “So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare.”īezos and Jassy’s relationship deepened in the years after, with Bezos tasking his younger lieutenant with exploring the then-nascent technology of cloud computing around 2003. Jassy also made a peculiar first impression on his boss by accidentally hitting him in the head with a kayak paddle during a characteristically competitive game of company broomball, as recounted in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
Jassy went on to become Bezos’ first “shadow” adviser, something like a corporate chief of staff who followed the CEO every day and sat in on all of his meetings, according to a profile of Jassy published late last month by Insider. Jassy moved out West with the intention of one day returning to New York, according to an interview last year on The Disruptive Voice podcast, but he’s never held a job at another company. Jassy graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and joined Amazon soon thereafter as part of a wave of fresh MBAs flocking to the tech industry before the dot-com boom. When Jassy joined Amazon in the late ‘90s, the company was years away from thinking about the cloud and still focused solely on e-commerce. For Amazon, change is both the most important survival instinct and its most successful business tool. Yet if Jassy continues to see himself as an acolyte of Bezos and his famous “Day 1” mentality - which argues that companies start to decline and die the moment they rest on their laurels - it will mean plenty of change is on the horizon. The big question Amazon insiders and those on the outside looking in will try to answer in the next six months, before he takes the job in the third quarter of the year, will be whether Jassy deviates from Bezos’ approach or sticks to business as usual.
Jassy’s ascent to the top job at Amazon may similarly usher in an era of transformation for the e-commerce giant. Nadella modernized many elements of Microsoft’s business and company culture with a focus on the cloud and mobile computing, as well as an excellent eye for major acquisitions. The transition of power is reminiscent of Satya Nadella’s promotion to the CEO role at Microsoft in 2014, after Nadella spent three years running the company’s Azure cloud business. In the case of AWS, that includes everything from Netflix and Spotify to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Democratic National Committee.When AWS goes down, huge chunks of the internet go with it. His promotion underscores the importance of cloud computing to the biggest tech titans that now play vital roles in powering the entire internet. Andy Jassy transformed AWS into a $50 billion a year business, and now he will lead all of Amazonįar from a household name, Jassy is still one of the most consequential executives in Amazon’s history.
0 kommentar(er)
