AWS CEO: We're not spinning out, likely to seek acquisitions Amazon is not planning to spin off its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division. Instead, AWS is likely to make acquisitions of its own in order to keep ahead in the cloud services market, according to its chief executive Adam Selipsky. AWS is massively profitable for Amazon, with the cloud services arm pulling in revenue of $ …
Investors might feel they'd getting ROI if their investment was purely in high growth cloud services rather than the slower growing retail behemoth that's also part of the company but the pricing already factors that in and there's a key factor in AWS' success: They know it works because they use it.
I can't see value for existing shareholders in spinning it off, even if the spun off company is attractive to new ones. The retail arm's drop in value (due to now having increased friction and expense in its IT hosting) would offset any direct gains for existing shareholders.
Possibly more relevant, because I'm not CEO material, if there was value in spinning it off then a certain Mr Bezos would already have taken that route - he's demonstrated a level of business building prowess that, while not infallible, I'm not sure greedy investors can pretend to match.
You were thrown off by the article's use of the term investors: "Investors, for example, have been said to be keen to buy into AWS separately from its Amazon mothership because of the rapid growth the cloud services subsidiary is enjoying."
Investors make money on value -- "business building" in your words. Speculators make money on volatility, they don't care about the underlying business. It's the speculators who are keen to see the spinoff.
There is no cloud. It is just someone else’s computer.
In the 1960s when IBM thought there was only a market for 100 or so computers worldwide they came up with the idea of “Time Sharing”.
Notwithstanding later schemes by the same name to sub-let your condo, IBMs Time Sharing was just what THE CLOUD was originally called.
My hardware. My OS. My system level software and infrastructure. I’ll even install and maintain applications for you - for a price.
Everything old is new again.
fully agree, Cloud should be replaced with the acronym OPT
Other Peoples Tin
cloud invokes some kind of ethereal intangible location that is unreachable and unobtainable.
when TBF the cloud is more like Dave's Bitbarn in a sleazy industrial estate where there might be CCTV cameras, but they dont all work, and the main entrance may be secure, but there are tons of others...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
