In emails, Mr. Jassy responded to good news by simply saying “Nice,” with a seemingly random number of exclamation points, the current and former employees said. Many debated whether the number of exclamation points held any secret meaning.
Mr. Jassy also made time for staff activities. At an annual Buffalo wing eating competition known as the Tatonka Bowl, he acted as the master of ceremonies. He granted participants “badges,” one with a flaming chicken, that showed up on Amazon’s internal directory.
In recent years, AWS has rolled out its own software services to run on top of its machines, often spelling doom for start-ups with competing products.
Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group, who writes a newsletter called “Last Week in AWS,” said the cloud computing unit displayed the same relentlessness in pursuing new products and markets as Amazon’s main retail site.
“They seem to share a common belief that impossible is just a matter of time,” he said.
Last year, sales at AWS grew to $45.4 billion, or 12 percent of the company’s revenue and 63 percent of its profits.
After he becomes chief executive, Mr. Jassy’s opinions will be under greater scrutiny. Early last year, he spoke enthusiastically about selling police departments Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition technology, which has been criticized for bias against darker-skinned people.
“Let’s see” if police departments somehow “abuse the technology,” he told the PBS program “Frontline” in February. “They haven’t done that. To assume they’re going to do it and therefore you shouldn’t allow them to have access to the most sophisticated technology out there doesn’t feel like the right balance to me.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/andy-jassy-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos.html
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