The potential contained in AWS is genuinely staggering, and its biggest competitors, including Microsoft and Google, have a lot of catching up to do
In the popular imagination, Amazon is a big huge store run by Jeff Bezos. But its profit center already lies elsewhere.
Image: Ashleigh Corrin via The New York Times
In the popular imagination, Amazon is a big huge store run by Jeff Bezos, a smiling man with a clean-shaven head who is, sometimes, the richest person in the world. You order and Amazon delivers.
Because it’s a big, huge store that wants to be bigger and huger, you can also stream TV shows and buy Amazon-branded personal gadgets and Amazon-branded home security devices. You can order groceries there, too. This is a version of the story Amazon has been telling about itself, to customers, since the very beginning, and one that has made it enormously successful.
But behind Amazon’s success is also a guy named Andy Jassy, whom most of the company’s customers had never heard of before Wednesday, when Bezos announced that he would succeed him as CEO.
In a letter to employees, Bezos expressed his “full confidence” in his successor, leaving unsaid what Jassy has been up to for the past decade, because employees surely knew. He’s credited with creating and growing Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing division, into the largest such provider in the world. You, the Amazon customer, have little reason to know about this, because AWS is not for you.
Jassy’s ascent suggests that the Amazon synonymous with Bezos — an online store that once sold books and now sells everything, where the customer is always right — could one day be reduced to a quaint origin story. After all, the future of Amazon isn’t just about more shopping, though the shoppers will still be there, and they will be shopping more. It’s about infrastructure.
©2019 New York Times News Service