But also, what synergy do the tech giant and retail giant parts of Amazon have?
If the two parts of the business don't really gel, what's the benefit of keeping them together in one company?
If the two parts of the business don't really gel, what's the benefit of keeping them together in one company?
Here are a few different ways that AWS and Retail interact:
1. The obvious that everyone knows: Retail uses AWS's products, providing feedback and ideas for new services and features.
2. Employee transfers: it's quite common for people to move between Retail and AWS and vice versa, and they bring what they learned in one org to their new org, helping to spread information about best practices.
3. Other employee knowledge transfers: I've personally benefited from engineers in AWS sharing their knowledge about general engineering topics on internal interest mailing lists or through tech talks.
4. Best practices: there are some differences, but AWS and Retail operate similarly in many ways: use of 6-pagers for sharing ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-p...), weekly review of metrics, hiring tools and practices being just a few examples.
As a soon to be employee on the AWS side and speaking very selfishly, I could see it benefiting AWS employees tremendously being separate from the low margin retail side. They would probably have benefits and compensation more in line with the other BigTech companies.
Employees at AWS definitely wouldn’t be as limited in what they can contribute to their 401K because they are considered Highly Compensated Employees and the contribution rate is weighed down by factory workers.
Amazon stock performs well because a lot of investors want access to both, so it’s not that big of a deal. Also Jeff Bezos holds a disproportionate amount of voting power (part of why he’s the richest person is because he held on to an unusually high percent of an unusually valuable company).
Ultimately they won’t split until one of them stops being a world-eating monster because no one will have leverage to force it on Jeff. It may never happen as long as amazon exists. But I guarantee the day amazon cloud stops growing at insane rates, people will call for a breakup.
People have been complaining about Amazon's investing policies (like reinvesting every penny instead of paying out dividends) for decades and not gotten anywhere though.