亞馬遜的雲征服者 The Amazon boss who conquered the cloud
Selling porcelain figurines and starting a cloud computing company may seem like rather different skills. But Andy Jassy, who founded and now leads Amazon Web Services, says one experience deeply informed the other.
銷售瓷偶與創立一家雲計算公司看似兩種截然不同的技能。但創立並且現在執掌着亞馬遜雲服務AWS(Amazon Web Services)的安迪雅西(Andy Jassy)說，其中一種經歷深深地影響了另一種。
“It was an unbelievable crash course in general management,” he says, referring to his time in the collectibles business, where he worked right after college for Danbury Mint, seller of dolls, coins, ornaments and keepsakes.
“這是一門難以置信的綜合管理速成課程，”他說，意指自己從事收藏品銷售業務的時光——他大學畢業後就到了Danbury Mint工作，那是一家銷售玩偶、硬幣、飾品及紀念品的公司。
“The products weren’t long-term interesting to me, but the general management training and the business training were fantastic.” After that he started his own project, eventually going back to business school and then ending up at Amazon where he worked as Jeff Bezos’s “shadow”, a position that is somewhere between chief of staff and technical assistant.
“那些產品長期而言對我不具有吸引力，但那裏的綜合管理培訓和業務培訓非常棒。”之後，他創辦了自己的項目，接着回到了商學院，再之後就把事業鎖定在了亞馬遜(Amazon)。在亞馬遜，他是傑夫貝索斯(Jeff Bezos)的“影子”——一個介乎辦公室主任與技術助理之間的位置。
Now Mr Jassy has his own shadow, a salt-and-pepper-haired engineer named Eric Docktor, who follows him into the room for our interview.
如今，雅西有了自己的影子——位名叫埃裏克多克託(Eric Docktor)的頭髮斑白的工程師——跟着他進入房間接受我們的採訪。
Seattle-based AWS has become the most closely watched division of Amazon after it was broken out as its own business segment in April. AWS, which rents out computing power and data storage, accounted for half of group profits in the most recent quarter. It is also the fastest-growing part of the company, accounting for one-fifth of revenue growth even though it is just one 20th of overall sales.
總部位於西雅圖的AWS在今年4月開始獨立運營後，已成爲亞馬遜旗下最受關注的事業部。出租計算能力與數據存儲的AWS貢獻了集團最近一個季度的一半利潤。它也是亞馬遜增長最快的部門，儘管只佔總銷售額的二十分之一，但貢獻了收入增長的五分之一。
When AWS started, its success looked anything but inevitable. When Mr Jassy wrote the “vision document” that laid out the idea for AWS in 2003, he wrestled with every word, going through 31 drafts. Amazon’s policy, then and now, is that these proposals be no longer than six pages, to force the writer to clarify his thinking (and to save the reader time).
在AWS創立之初，它看起來並非成功在望。當雅西2003年撰寫“願景文件”闡述AWS的經營理念時，他對每個詞都再三斟酌，先後修改了31次。不管是那時還是現在，亞馬遜的政策一直是：建議書不能超過6頁，以迫使撰寫者理清自己的思路（並節省讀者的時間）。
Through the revisions, the outline of AWS emerged with many of the key features it has today. Unlike its competitors at the time, it was to be pay-as-you-go, sparing users expensive monthly subscription plans. The computing platform was to be self-service — anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account could sign up.
通過不斷修改，AWS的輪廓逐漸浮出水面，而且許多其今天擁有的關鍵特徵當時已經出現。不同於那時的競爭對手，AWS採取“按使用付費”模式(pay-as-you-go)，用戶不必支付昂貴的月度會員費。計算平臺是自助式的，只要擁有信用卡和亞馬遜帳戶就可以簽約。
“We were targeting developers and start-ups who were not very well served at the time,” Mr Jassy recalls. And Amazon decided to make itself one of the first customers, in a key step that meant its own retail operations would be completely reliant on AWS.
“我們當時針對的是享受不到良好服務的開發者和初創企業，”雅西回憶道。而亞馬遜決定成爲AWS的首批客戶之一，這關鍵一步意味着自家的零售業務將完全依賴AWS。
Mr Jassy says his own lack of experience running technology infrastructure when he started AWS turned out to be an advantage, as it allowed him and his team to challenge the status quo. “Getting used to not being afraid to ask dumb questions was really important,” he recalls.
雅西說，在創立AWS時，自己在運營技術基礎設施方面缺乏經驗卻成了一種優勢，因爲這使得他和自己的團隊能夠挑戰現狀。“習慣於不怕提愚蠢的問題非常重要，”他回憶說。
One of the first big challenges was hiring his team — and doing so without telling potential employees what they would be working on. Amazon is notorious for its secrecy, and interviewees were not told about the plan until after they had been taken on.
首先遇到的巨大挑戰之一是招兵買馬組建自己的團隊，而且是在不告訴未來員工他們將從事什麼業務的情況下進行。亞馬遜以保密性著稱，應聘者直到被錄用後才被告知相關計劃。
“It was really important for nobody to know what we were building,” Mr Jassy says. “Nobody was expecting Amazon to build a technology infrastructure platform.”
“不讓任何人知道我們正在打造什麼的確非常重要，”雅西說，“沒人想到過亞馬遜會建立一個技術基礎設施平臺。”
He does not mention Microsoft by name, but the tech giant in Redmond, on the other side of Lake Washington, was clearly a big consideration in those early days. “It was really important to be the first mover in this space, because if one of the old-guard technology companies had built something like this and had been first to market, it would have been much harder for us to come in later.”
他沒有提及微軟(Microsoft)的名字，但這家總部位於華盛頓湖對岸雷德蒙德市(Redmond)的科技巨頭，顯然是AWS創立之初的重點考慮對象。“第一個進入這一領域真的很重要，因爲如果一家保守的技術公司建成了這樣一個平臺並首先進行營銷，我們後來再想進入就要難得多了。”
Interviewees were told they would be working on expanding a programming interface for another Amazon business. The strategy worked — even better than Mr Jassy had expected — and it took Amazon’s competitors years to cotton on to the potential of cloud computing services.
應聘者被告知他們的工作將是爲亞馬遜的另一項業務擴展應用程序編程接口。這一策略起到的作用甚至超出了雅西的預期，而亞馬遜的競爭對手們數年後才意識到雲計算服務的潛力。
“In my wildest dreams I don’t think anyone believed at the time we would have the seven-year headstart we had,” Mr Jassy says.
“即使再敢想象，我也不會認爲當時有人會相信我們能夠搶先7年時間這樣做，”雅西說。
Today the competitors have caught on in a big way. AWS has come into the limelight at a time when pretty much every large IT company — from IBM to Oracle to Google — would be happy to steal some of its business.
如今，競爭對手們已經深知雲計算的發展前景。AWS已經到了聚光燈下，而此時幾乎所有大型IT公司——從IBM、甲骨文(Oracle)到谷歌(Google)——都很樂意偷走它的一些業務。
AWS has stayed ahead of the pack: Gartner, the research group, estimates that it has 10 times the computing capacity of its 14 nearest competitors combined. But Microsoft in particular has been catching up. Last month its share price rose to a 15-year high, helped by the news that revenues from Azure, its cloud computing platform had doubled from the previous year.
AWS一直處於行業領先地位：研究公司Gartner估計，AWS的計算能力是實力最接近的14家競爭對手計算能力總和的10倍。但微軟正在帶頭趕上。上月，微軟的股價漲至15年來的高點，這主要得益於一則消息：其旗下雲計算平臺Azure的收入比上年翻了一番。
“AWS has competition that it has to think about at least, for the first time in its existence,” says Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. She does not see this as a threat, however, pointing out that the services from AWS and Microsoft cater for different user bases. “Amazon remains the king, Microsoft merely has gotten stronger.”
“AWS自創立以來首次遇到了至少不得不去考慮的競爭，”Gartner的分析師莉迪婭脠(Lydia Leong)說。她不認爲這是一種威脅，但指出，AWS與微軟所提供的服務滿足的是不同的用戶基礎。“亞馬遜仍是王者，微軟只是變得更強大。”
AWS also has plenty of challenges from within. Maintaining reliability as it grows quickly is one: a major outage at the end of September took its Virginia data centre region offline for five hours.
AWS也面臨着來自內部的諸多挑戰。在快速擴張的同時保持可靠性就是挑戰之一：9月底的一次大斷電使得其在弗吉尼亞的數據中心地區停機5個小時。
Another risk is losing its position as the darling of the analyst community. Among the investor community, the enthusiasm around AWS helped Amazon’s share price double in 2015.
另一種風險是失去作爲分析師圈子中的寵兒的地位。在投資者中，圍繞AWS的熱情幫助亞馬遜的股價在2015年翻了一番。
That could wane, however, as the debt structures that AWS has used to finance its server purchases catch up with it over time.
然而，假以時日，受AWS用於融資購買服務器的債務結構的影響，這股熱情可能減弱。
Because the AWS business is growing so quickly, its depreciation cost — the writedown it takes to reflect its assets’ loss of value through age and use — is much lower than its capital expenditure . This means that profit margins will shrink for AWS as growth slows and depreciation catches up to its true capex levels.
由於AWS的業務增長非常迅速，其折舊成本——反映因年份和使用而導致的資產價值損耗的資產減記——遠低於其資本支出。這意味着，隨着增長放緩以及折舊趕上其真正的資本支出水平，AWS的利潤率將出現收縮。
Perhaps the biggest challenge of the moment is a crisis of culture. Amazon’s hard-driving work culture has come under scrutiny after an exposé by The New York Times earlier this year, which described scenes of frequent confrontation and employees crying at their desks.
或許，當前最大的挑戰是文化危機。亞馬遜過於苛刻的工作文化開始受到密切關注，起因是《紐約時報》(The New York Times)今年早些時候對其進行了曝光，文章中描述了頻繁的衝突以及員工坐在辦公桌前哭泣的場景。
Mr Jassy, who has been at the company for nearly two decades, says Amazon’s culture is a “real competitive advantage” for the company — and that healthy disagreements are part of that.
已經爲亞馬遜效力近20年的雅西說，公司的文化對亞馬遜而言是一項“真正的競爭優勢”，而有益的爭論是這種文化的一部分。
He rejects the Times articles as “skewed”, but acknowledges that having the backbone to disagree is part of the Amazon style. “We have a very important cultural principle that we want people to respectfully challenge each other when they disagree.” These types of challenging conversations were key for some of the early decisions at AWS, he adds.
他將《紐約時報》的文章斥爲“歪曲事實”，但他承認，有勇氣發表不同觀點是亞馬遜風格的一部分。“我們有一個非常重要的文化原則，我們希望人們有不同意見時能在彼此尊重的基礎上相互挑戰。”他補充說，這些類型的挑戰性對話對於AWS早期的一些決策而言很關鍵。
The fast-paced Amazon culture is one reason why people such as Mr Jassy stay at the company. “Amazon is a place that really functions like a large start-up. It is not slow and stodgy and bureaucratic, we move way more fast,” he explains. “It is a pioneering culture.”
亞馬遜的快節奏文化是雅西這樣的人留在該公司的原因之一。“亞馬遜是一個真正像大型初創企業一樣運行的地方。它不會慢吞吞的，不會古板僵化，沒有官僚作風，我們的動作更加迅速，”他解釋道，“這是一種開拓型的文化”。
