Amazon employs more than a million people, in relationships both traditional and nontraditional. (In early February, Amazon agreed to pay $62 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it withheld tips from Amazon Flex delivery drivers — gig workers who often drive their own vehicles.)
An Amazon that doesn’t need as much from the post office or carriers like FedEx is an Amazon that may eventually compete with them more broadly, or even replace them. An Amazon that offers, by virtue of its size, an easier, cheaper way to handle your company’s hosting and computing needs may eventually become a company with which doing such business doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all.
The potential contained in A.W.S. — to embed itself in every major industry in the economy — is genuinely staggering, and its biggest competitors, including Microsoft and Google, have a lot of catching up to do. An unfettered A.W.S. would have no close precedent but perhaps a few instructive ones: railroads, energy, banking.
Life for the average Amazon customer will, of course, continue to change, as the company continues to expand its commerce and entertainment offerings. The old Amazon will remain front and center for the customer that is already there, and it will provide opportunities to opt in, or out, of new relationships with the company: for food; for medicine; for security; for play.
The Amazon Mr. Jassy helped build, the one he will soon inherit, doesn’t depend on that customer’s permission. It’s defined, instead, by what, and whom, they don’t see. It’s defined by conversations in which the loyal, Prime-subscribing public isn’t a participant, but rather a source of leverage: over partners, suppliers, workers and, most of all, newer types of customers.
Amazon spent its first decades fighting to be front of mind. Perhaps its next phase, to by overseen by Mr. Jassy, is to disappear into even greater power — ambient, diffuse, inescapable. Like an enveloping fog. Or a cloud.
