Washington: Jeff Bezos leaves an enduring legacy after changing Amazon from a humble online bookseller to one of the world’s most powerful organizations as he prepares to step down as the CEO of Amazon.
Bezos, 57, was poised to give over the reins of Amazon,he created 27 years ago, to Andy Jassy on Monday, allowing him to focus on his private space exploration firm, philanthropy, and other endeavors. He will continue to play a major role as executive chair of the technological and e-commerce behemoth.
Amazon have drawn attention over time with its innovations. The firm has been chastised for its business methods that have set high bars for its competitors and raised questions about how a workforce of over a million people is treated.
Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, said that Bezos have been a transformational leader in bookselling, retail market, cloud computing and home delivery. He went on to say that the whole e-commerce sector owes many of its innovations to Bezos.
Amazon took birth in a garbage where Bezos would pack orders himself and deliver boxes to post office. Today, with a market value of more than $1.7 trillion, I annual revenue in 2020 was $386 billion from operations in e-commerce, cloud computing, groceries, artificial intelligence, streaming media and more.
Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said that Bezos ” had an instinct for the right thing” in finding the next market. The transition was from books to other merchandise to an online marketplace and successfully built the cloud infrastructure for the company which became the highly profitable Amazon Web Services.
Kay said that Amazon outlasted its rivals by forgoing profits in its early years “and reinvesting everything into expanding.” This made Bezos one of the best business architects of his time.
Bezos was not the first or only one in e-commerce, but was able to outdo rivals as Bezos recognized the need to develop an infrastructure including the vast network of warehouses, trucks, planes and other logistics for the business, stated Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research.
The rise of Amazon into an e-commerce giant made Jeff Bezos into one of the richest people in the world with a net worth of $200 billion.
As he steps down from day-to-day Amazon management, he is focusing on projects that include Bezos’s space firm, Blue Origin. He also owns the Washington Post newspaper and has devoted time and funds to fight climate change.
With Jeff Bezos away, there are concerns about Amazon’s future as the company faces scrutiny and opposition from activists.
Amazon was able to boost its US workforce by 800,000 during the pandemic with its fast delivery of goods and groceries and other services. Even though the firm boasts of $15 minimum wage and other benefits, the Teamsters union recently launched a campaign to organize Amazon employees, claiming its workers “face dehumanizing, unsafe and low-pay jobs, with high turnover and no voice at work.”
Bezos in his final letter as chief executive, laid out a new goal for the firm to be “Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.”
However, Amazon is likely to face challenges and keep up with its trajectory in the future.
