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On February 2, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that in the second half of 2021 he will step down as CEO of the company (the equivalent of our CEO). In his place will be Andy Jassy, currently the director of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s company that deals with providing cloud computing systems or the servers that many Internet sites around the world depend on.
Jassy is 53, born in Scarsdale, New York, and has been with Amazon since 1997, almost since the company’s inception three years earlier. After studying economics at Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, and having worked for some time as a business manager for theHarvard Crimson, The college newspaper, Jassy immediately found work at Amazon, which at the time was transforming itself from a small e-commerce book site to what we know today as one of the largest IT platforms in the world.
Jassy recently recounted on a Harvard Business School podcast how she came to work at Amazon: “I took my last exam on the first Friday in May 1997 and started working at Amazon the following Monday. I had no idea what my job would be or what role I would play. ”He initially worked at the company as a marketing manager, and in the early 2000s he became Bezos’s technical assistant, a kind of chief of staff of sorts.
In 2003, he was among the people behind the creation of AWS, of which he became president three years later. Over the years, Amazon’s cloud services division has become the most profitable, and many have long believed that Jassy would replace Bezos at the helm of Amazon. In the fourth quarter of 2020, AWS accounted for 67 percent of the company’s total operating profit, posting net revenue of nearly $ 10 billion and operating income of $ 2.6 billion.
The fact that the head of AWS could become the new CEO of Amazon was considered by many to be a close possibility, given the importance that cloud computing has had in recent years and Jass’s ability to deal with companies. rivals like Microsoft. , Google and Oracle in this area. In a sense, their promotion is an implicit affirmation of the growing importance of cloud services in the future of Amazon and the entire IT industry.
He had already written about Jassy’s possible promotion in September. Washington Post, after Jeff Wilke, head of the global consumer division and considered one of Bezos’ possible successors, surprisingly announced that he was leaving the company. On that occasion the newspaper had spoken of Jassy as Bezos’s natural heir, also because of his personality similar to that of the founder. A former executive had anonymously said that Jassy had over time taken on “a lot of Jeff’s persona,” however noting that “it’s more a person with creative ideas than an operative person.
Additionally, in recent months, Jassy has been at the center of various criticism for initially advocating the sale of facial recognition software via artificial intelligence to US law enforcement agencies, only to block its use following protests. from civil rights groups, following the many cases of US police violence against persons belonging to ethnic minorities. In fact, some studies had shown that facial recognition software, such as Amazon’s, failed to identify African Americans and women in several cases, leading to incorrect and potentially very harmful results.
Jassy also publicly criticized former US President Donald Trump after the Defense Department signed a $ 10 billion, 10-year contract with Microsoft as a partner to manage its services in 2019. Jassy accused Trump of choosing to Microsoft solely for its poor relationship with Bezos, and despite the fact that AWS services received a better security certification than Microsoft’s.
In December 2019, at the AWS annual conference, Jassy said the Defense Department’s decision was solely due to Trump’s dislike of Bezos: “When you have a president who openly expresses his contempt for a company and for the leader of that company, it’s really difficult for government agencies, including the Department of Defense, to make an objective decision without fear of retaliation. ‘
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