Jeff Bezos will leave his successor, Andy
Jassy, with “both massive challenges
and enormous opportunities,” said Kara
Swisher in The New York Times. Bezos
is the only leader Amazon has ever had.
But Jassy, who will take over as CEO
of the company later this year, has been
perhaps his “most loyal lieutenant, join-
ing Bezos right out of Harvard Business
School in 1997.” He built Amazon Web
Services from “a skunkworks inside a
larger company” into “one of the most
valuable entities in the world.” And
like Bezos—who will remain Amazon’s
chairman—Jassy “hates to lose.”AWS has been “the engine of Amazon’s continuous reinvention”
for years, said Nick Statt in TheVerge.com, “and Jassy is the
spark that helps drive it.” He was years ahead of competitors
in realizing the potential in letting “third-party companies build
their own e-commerce operations” atop Amazon’s cloud infra-
structure. Companies from Netflix to Airbnb to Twitter now use
AWS to build and maintain their businesses, because Amazon
can offer “unparalleled resources” and easy-to-use development
tools. Remarkably, AWS accounted for 63 percent of Amazon’s
profits in 2020 and holds a larger share of the entire cloud infra-
struc ture market than its two closest competitors, Microsoft and
Google, combined.All this doesn’t mean Amazon can or will
ignore its retail business, said Dan Gal-
lagher in The Wall Street Journal. Jassy’s
appointment has “spawned the predict-
able avalanche of interpretations that the
cloud is now Amazon’s most important
business.” But the company’s retail rev-
enue last year was six times what AWS
generated, not even including the sub-
scription fees customers pay for Prime.
Jassy has to prove he knows how to “sell
books, sweatpants, and talking speakers”
as well as run a tech business.Bezos’ announcement last week that he would give up the CEO
spot came as a jolt, but he’s “been laying the groundwork for
such a move for years,” said Dana Mattioli and Sebastian Her-
rera in The Wall Street Journal. Recently he has “focused much
more on high-level strategic decisions,” and he’s known to “quip
that the only time he really knew all that was going at Amazon
was in its annual budget meetings.” As executive chairman, an
increasingly popular title among Silicon Valley founders, he’ll be
a “strategic guide” for Jassy. His successor can use that because
there won’t be any “honeymoon period,” said Jay Greene and
Cat Zakrzewski in The Washington Post. Within a day of Ama-
zon announcing Jassy’s coming ascent, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the
top Democrat on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, said, “I look
forward to talking to him about competition issues.”Amazon: A new chief cast in the Bezos mold
AP
Parler, still offline, fires its CEO
The co-founder and CEO of Parler said he
was fired by its board, said Jeff Horwitz and
Keach Hagey in The Wall Street Journal. John
Matze, who helped launch the alternative so-
cial messaging platform in 2018, was “within
days of restoring service to its roughly 15 mil-
lion users” after Apple and Google barred it
from their app stores and Amazon kicked Par-
ler off its web- hosting service over the service’s
role in the U.S. Capitol attack. Matze said he
was “seeking to adjust the platform’s modera-
tion rules” and add a ban on “designated do-
mestic terrorist organizations.” Dan Bongino,
a prominent conservative talk show host and
Parler investor, said the site “could have been
up in a week if we just would have bent the
knee,” suggesting Parler “intended to fight
back against the tech platforms.”Apple auto partnership hits snags
Apple has been talking with Hyundai and Kia
about building an electric vehicle, said Mark
Gurman in Bloomberg.com, but the project
has already hit a roadblock. The tech giant
“keeps development projects secret for years
and controls relationships with suppliers with
ruthless efficiency,” and it became upset when
Hyundai, which owns Kia, issued a prema-ture statement revealing its relationship with
Apple. Though the “secret project has ramped
up in recent months” it’s unclear when talks
will resume. Apple has teased its vision of an
“Apple car” for nearly a decade with little to
show for it. The company has a “small team
of engineers” working on the project, but de-
velopment is still at an early stage.Tracking the Capitol rioters
Data collected from smartphone apps allowed
us to track the movements of dozens of Capi-
tol insurgents, said Charlie Warzel and Stuart
Thompson in The New York Times. Phones
are routinely surveilled in a complex advertis-
ing ecosystem that “turns every location ping
into currency.” While the data made available
to advertisers is supposed to be anonymized,
we were able to “connect dozens of devices to
their owners, tying anonymous locations back
to names, home addresses, social networks,
and phone numbers.” We tracked 100,
location pings for thousands of smartphones,
“revealing 130 devices inside the Capitol” on
Jan. 6. One device led us back to the home
of a Kentucky pest-control business owner.
“When we reached him by phone, he insisted
he never entered the Capitol.” But his phone
data shows he did.Bytes: What’s new in tech
Google’s new
technology lets
users measure
their heart rate and
respiratory rate
with a smartphone
camera, said
Darrell Etherington
in TechCrunch
.com. Phones and
wearables gener-
ally need “special-
ized hardware” to
collect vital signa-
tures. But Google has developed
“computer vision–based methods”
that it says “can produce results that
are comparable to clinical-grade
measurement hardware.” The soft-
ware tools, to be released initially
on Google’s own Pixel phones next
month, “monitors movements in
a person’s chest as they breathe”
to measure the respiratory rate.
Cameras can also detect subtle
color changes in fingertips, which
indicate when oxygenated blood is
flowing. Google is working on fur-
ther enhancements, including ways
to measure blood flow using only
“color changes in a person’s face.”Innovation of the week
Technology NEWS^19
Jassy has served as Bezos’ most loyal lieutenant.