[brador]

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now.

Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push.

No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a flash.

[saosebastiao]

I'd say Andrew Jassy is the person you are looking for. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about the day to day strategy of AWS or any other existing Amazon business. He has implicitly said as much in his speeches at Amazon. He really only cares about the next billion dollar business to build within Amazon. Jassy leads AWS, which is the only technologically innovative part of Amazon. The retail side of Amazon is a technological black hole...a few standouts swimming amongst a sea of half-implemented non-solutions to problems that no longer exist but can't be changed because legacy.

[wpietri]

That definitely matches my understanding. As a long-time user of both Amazon and AWS (respectively 1997 and 2006), their product management strategies seem very different to me.

A lot of Amazon stuff smacks of high-level micromanagement. E.g., their thoroughly failed phone. Or the disappointing feature mish-mash that is the Kindle app. On the positive side, the original Kindle was groundbreaking because of similar micromanagement.

But the AWS stuff feels much more bottom up to me. They start with some small, discreet notion. They trial it in private, getting feedback and evolving in careful response to users. When it's solid enough, they open it up for everyone. And then they keep iterating, making things gradually better.

[saosebastiao]

I would agree with that. Small story: Working on the retail side of Amazon, one day I got pissed that if I wanted to use PostgreSQL that I had to set up my own EC2 server and EBS infrastructure and maintain it, whereas if I wanted a MySQL instance I could just use RDS. I had a few legitimate usecases at the time that required PostGIS, so I was annoyed about it and I vented on a few mailing lists about the lack of PostgreSQL in RDS.

In a move that I would have never seen in the retail side, a product manager at RDS emailed me and set up a meeting with me and a director and VP. He invited me to make my case for having PostgreSQL as an RDS option. For about an hour I explained why the existing options didn't fit my use case, how there was a burgeoning market that was waiting for it due to Oracle's mismanagement of MySQL, and how there were several teams within Amazon that preferred the strictness and standards compliance of PostgreSQL but chose MySQL due to not having to manage it. They thanked me, and less than a year later there was a public announcement of a PostgreSQL offering in RDS.

I don't think I can take full credit for them launching it...they already had public forum threads of people asking for it and tons of +1 responses. But they actually listened to me, and they took into account my expressed desires to have several extensions available as well. That sort of bottoms up communication doesn't happen on the other side of Amazon.

[wpietri]

Nice. Glad to hear that AWS builds products exactly how I think they should be built.

[astazangasta]

One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone here.

[nugget]

One manager's decision can make the work of hundreds of people worthless or even destructive. I've lived thru and seen it. Like it or not the shot callers at the top wield enormous influence and the ones who make consistently good decisions should be celebrated for that.

[jazzyk]

You are right - one bad decision can destroy a project/product.

But the opposite is not necessarily true. To ship insanely great things, you need a lot of factors to come together, not just one person's decision (although it helps).

Steve Jobs kept using ideas from the people who worked from him (presenting them later as his ideas). Yes, he had great intuition and good taste to choose the better ideas, but without the people who generated these ideas, he would have been yet another arrogant, loudmouth suit.

[brador]

It's his name on the door. The buck stops there.

(And he's driving the culture.)

[westernmostcoy]

The culture which may launch a lot in some parts, but does not uniformly ensure quality and is well documented as being difficult to work in.

Amazon is far too large to give Jeff credit for 100% of the output, despite his name being on the door or ultimate decision making authority belonging to him.

[ohitsdom]

Amazon has been busy, but I still have to go with Satya Nadella. Since he's gotten the job in early 2014, Microsoft has shipped amazing things. Many of his decisions have helped redefine company culture, for the better.

Amazon has shipped a lot, but I think the new Microsoft has a bigger impact. Off the top of my head: open-sourcing .NET, SSH to Windows, Surface product line, Hololens development, Windows 10 (hit a few bumps, but free is HUGE), cross-platform software push, stronger open-source commitment...

[brador]

Satya has made some huge changes, and they're moving, but it's a beast of a company to push.

Win 10 still has a chance to hit a home run and make his name, but only if hard decisions are made. That 6.63% market share could be easily 25%+ right now, somethings gone wrong and they need to look at that and fix before users find the alternatives.

[mistermann]

Oh please, somethings gone wrong? Maybe the 56.53% of Windows 7 users are like me and are perfectly happy with the way things are.

[grogenaut]

So you're crediting Satya with windows 10? That started way before he was ceo.

[ohitsdom]

A lot was started before he took over, but there's still been a dramatic change since it happened.

When SSH was announced, the team said they tried twice before and were shot down. This time, they got executive support. I bet there were many great, open ideas that Ballmer shot down that Nadella would approve of. My point being- of course good things were in progress before he took over, but they seem more likely to make it out the door now.

[gorena]

> Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now.

As long as you're not one of his employees, sure.

If I had a choice between working for Bezos or working for Joel Spolsky at half the pay, it wouldn't even be close. Of course, in real life, Fog Creek probably pays more anyways.

[brador]

Fog creek is nice, but you're working on small localized projects compared to Amazons scale and breadth.

Amazon employees are pushed hard, and that's their key to shipping innovation.

Look at Googles cuddle farm - Lots of innovation that rarely ships and no risk taking.

How about Apple - Constrained innovation, low risk, Once a year shipping.

And there's a hundred other CEOs and companies that just don't come close. From an investor standpoint, Bezos is the gold standard of post-IPO CEO. Risk taking, innovation, shipping. The dude's on point.

He understands risk taking is the key because returns on hits are 10-1000x your investment. Look at EC2. That can cover the cost of 1000 "firephone" style project failures. But you gotta get it out of R&D and into the market. You need to ship.

And he gets that.

[Daishiman]

Under those metrics, almost all of Amazon's products have been flops and none are not any way similar to the cash cows that Google and Apple have managed to develop and maintain without succumbing to competitors.

I don't think that having to run rust to stay in place the way Amazon does is a sustainable business strategy.

[brador]

As an investor I'm not looking for Thiels "sustainable business strategy", I want growth. New products, new markets, pushing the envelope.

And that comes from taking risks,, shipping, and dealing with failures. Google and Apple are simply not doing that in a meaningful way, and their share price reflects that.

[uxcn]

I'm not sure I agree with this about Amazon, but some of it may just be strategy opinion differences. Apple and Google both have higher capitalizations, but more importantly they operate at growing profits as opposed to a loss. Google's share price is also substantially higher than Amazon's.

Bezos has definitely made some good decisions, but I think attributing too much to one person (correct or incorrect) is a bit of a problem. Either the company fails without that person, or the perception is that the company can't succeed without that person.

Regardless, my personal opinion on Amazon's overall retail strategy and execution is honestly pretty bad.

[cle]

Depends on what kind of impact you want your work to have.

(Not saying that Bezos's style is the reason for his impact, though it might be.)

[edw519]

Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride.

Their risk taking is also very well managed because they're shipping dog food.

Almost everything that we techies see as innovative is really a byproduct of their primary business of shipping "stuff".

Their risk is reduced because they know what they're pushing has already been outrageously successful for their toughest customer: themselves.

That's a valuable lesson for all would-be startup founders.

[jrockway]

Is this product much different from Google's BigQuery?

[matsur]

BigQuery's AWS analog is Redshift -- this is more akin to Tableau/Mode/Periscope/Chartio etc.

[draw_down]

He strikes me as someone that had a couple brilliant fundamental insights, which compose the core of the business. But if one starts thinking everything one shits out is gold on the basis of such insights, one ends up with the Fire phone. However, that sort of thing is not likely to be a true problem for the business for quite a while. They can waste a lot of money and time before it ever becomes a problem.

[curiousjorge]

He's the REAL Steve Jobs

[eclipxe]

I agree.