House Cleaning

A Bloomberg’s article listing the (big) projects that are recently canned under Andy’s watch

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As someone who worked at Amazon for a long time, much of it under JeffB, Andy’s actions feel like a sea change.

Jeff believes that when Amazon launches a product, feature, or service, its continuation represents a promise to customers. Discontinuing a product under his leadership was a rare occurrence compared to other major techs such as Google and Microsoft. The downside of this mindset is, similar to the one that “customers should be able to buy everything on amazon.com”, it leads to an excessive portfolio full of obsolete products.

As a customer, you may not be pleased with Andy’s decision (I am quite a fan of Amazon Book Store myself). From an investor’s perspective, however, it is positive for the stock. Andy may not excel at establishing new growth areas like Jeff, but if he can follow Tim Cook’s footsteps, optimizing the company’s operations and reducing costs, Amazon is certainly not a bad holding.

Amazon is not the only big tech that focuses on cost cutting these days. It is a prevalent move, and each company approaches it differently. Meta and Twitter, for example, focus more on cutting mid-management. While this is unpleasant for those impacted, it is good news for investors, if history is any indication.