Bigger is better, Amazon executives seem to firmly believe.
The company is not kicking around the idea of spinning off its massively profitable Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit or even launching new separate business units as AWS grows, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels told Business Insider.
"We have no intention of doing anything like that," Vogels told Business Insider. "I think there's great synergies between retail and AWS. There's great technology transfer between the two of them. Although we do treat Amazon, the retailer, from an AWS perspective, as just another customer. Because you can't have preferential treatment."
That viewpoint gives some interesting insight into how executives view the increasing calls to break up big tech companies like Amazon, especially from prominent Democrats such as the presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Equally important, Amazon executives don't seem to give much thought to the question, "When does big become too big?" Amazon Web Services started as a project within the larger Amazon organization but grew into its own unit with its own CEO. But Vogels balks at the idea of some other piece of AWS following suit and getting made into its own unit.
"We have no discussions around that at all because the synergies are too good," he said. To the company's way of thinking, a big united Amazon is good for its customers, he said.
That philosophy harks back to Jeff Bezos' famous "virtuous-cycle" diagram — also known as the Amazon flywheel — which the CEO first sketched on a napkin in 2001 and continues to be taught to new recruits, including via a video posted on Amazon's recruiting site by Jeff Wilke, Amazon's retail CEO.
The diagram depicts how growth allows Amazon to offer more products, which, in turn, increases the number of sellers and customers on Amazon, which allows Amazon to invest in making it a better platform for customers and sellers with lower prices and fees, respectively, which then fuels further growth.
Vogels also offered an example of how the growth of Amazon as a whole is good for AWS: It helps retain engineering talent. Amazon, he said, has a "migration program," in which its engineers get to jump to other teams every few years.
"After a few years on one team, they can actually pick another team they want to go to. They may, for example, want to go work with the fulfillment center's robots, or the AWS engineers. Or some people on the robotics team may want to come to AWS. So there's a great synergy internally as well," he said.
To his point, Amazon has a reputation for allowing engineers to jump to new teams, even on their first day. Some say it's not as easy as just picking a new team. Like other massive companies with a wide variety of technologies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, when people transfer to new teams, they typically have to pass a new round of interviews.
But the idea is that by offering so much cutting-edge technology internally, its workforce doesn't have to jump ship to learn new things. So, even with 647,000 employees in 2019, Amazon's official word is that bigger is still better.
