Amazon’s Cruel CEO
Amazon CEO Jassy was arrogant to believe he could time the e-commerce market, and it has cost 27,000 people their jobs.
Amazon’s relatively new chief executive, Andy Jassy, has laid off another 9,000 people, bringing the total since his tenure began to 27,000. Jassy kept his job, although he clearly has sunk the amazing company that founder Jeff Bezos built. Jassy has failed at every turn and decided to take it out on his workers. (Here are the industries laying off the most workers.)
Jassy was head of the highly profitable Amazon Web Services. Bezos should have kept him there. He has all but dismantled Amazon’s original and larger e-commerce business. He overextended distribution at a time when sales started to flatten and the online segment began to lose money.
The layoffs also show a lack of imagination. They are a sign Jassy does not plan to expand rapidly to another business. With its size and scale, Amazon should be more than just an e-commerce and cloud business. It should, in profile, look more like Microsoft.
Jassy wrote to employees that Amazon was too badly run to need them. He partially blamed the economy: “Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
Amazon has a basic problem that Jassy has been unable to overcome. It is no longer taking market share in its dominant business, e-commerce. Amazon’s forecast for the current quarter is that revenue will be between $121 billion and $126 billion, up between 4% and 8% over the same period a year ago. Since AWS continues to grow, e-commerce revenue must be dropping. Amazon also forecast an operating income of $0 to $4 billion, compared to $3.7 billion last year. Once again, AWS is growing, which means e-commerce is in trouble.
Jassy was arrogant to believe he could time the e-commerce market, and it has cost 27,000 people their jobs.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
