Amazon’s hardware teams first to face axe as tech giant downsizes

>In a memo to staff, Jassy suggested even sacred cows, such as the online store, could be hit in the coming months. Already, a hiring freeze is in place across the entire company.

By far the most shocking thing in this article. Amazon's online store has been getting worse and worse in quality, to the point where I've largely stopped using it if I can get things anywhere else. From my perspective, the competition from WalMart is especially big - WalMart+, the guarantee of actual quality products, and the 1 day delivery that comes with it has been worth much more to me than Amazon Prime. For more niche things, I can buy direct online. So Amazon might lose out on a lot of market share if things keep going the way they are going.

I have to wonder what the long term effect of cutting back on online store employment is; will Amazon become the new Wish? Brick and mortar retailers aren't strangers to completely losing out on gigantic amounts of market share due to not keeping up (see KMart), who's to say this doesn't also apply to online retailers?

There were a couple of things that stood out for me in this:

>"The move seeks to satisfy investor demands for greater profitability at the company, which has seen its capitalisation fall from $1.8tn a year ago to $940bn today"

I guess the trillion dollar market cap is the new standard bearer for big tech?[1] How sustainable is this? This was not even a thing a few years ago. Now slipping slightly below that after a historic pandemic growth bump is cause for alarm and massive job cuts?

The article further states:

>"Still, overall revenue growth, including cloud, had fallen this year to as low as 7.3 and 7.2 per cent in the first two quarters, its lowest rate for more than two decades."

Note it didn't fall by 7.3% it only grew by 7.3% over the previous quarter of almost the same increase? How is that not respectable? Am I missing something?

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/shrinking-trillion-dollar-m...

> In his memo, which Amazon later posted on its corporate blog, Jassy set the scene for more sweeping dismissals in the remainder of this year and into the next. “Our annual planning process extends into the new year, which means there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments,” he wrote. “Those decisions will be shared with impacted employees and organisations early in 2023.”

That's a long time to have a sword dangling over your head. These employees are going to be under tremendous stress for at least a couple of months.