[swyx]

I'm not sure if this helps or hurts Tim's assertions (not mentioned in this piece, but from context he wants AWS to be spun off into a separate company). if AWS' share is so high, would AMZN shareholders approve a spinoff? does it matter since they get ownership of new-AWS anyway? unclear

whatever it is I think Tim has a research agenda here and we shouldn't be surprised to see him come up with a more forceful blogpost on the topic soon.

[cromulent]

If AWS had been a separate company, then he probably wouldn't have felt the need to quit over the whistleblower incidents.

As he describes here, under "What about AWS?".

"AWS...is a different story".

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...

[swyx]

right but I'm saying in this particular piece I don't think he's made a strong case either way to the people who will decide.

[biggestdecision]

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?

[jkingsbery]

(I'm an engineer at Amazon, but I don't speak on behalf of the company, I'm just sharing my experience)

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.

[scarface74]

This is all a Devils Advocate post. I have no reason to complain about my (future) compensation. Working in the consulting division allowed me to make $BigTech money as an “Enterprise Developer” without studying a single algorithm, and being able to work completely remote from a low cost of living area....

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.

[RC_ITR]

In general, investors would prefer two companies because those looking to invest in retail wouldn’t have to expose themselves to cloud & vice versa. That increase in demand for each component (investors who formerly ignored the stock owing to the above) would make the share price go up, all else constant.

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[RC_ITR]

Exactly.