Former Amazon ‘S-team’ executive Charlie Bell is joining Microsoft. Bell has decided to leave Amazon after almost 23 years. Out of these, he led the general management of Amazon Web Services for around 15 years. He was even considered to be the front runner to head AWS after Andy Jassy was promoted as the chief executive officer of the company. Now Bell is moving on and is reportedly joining the tech giant as a corporate vice president. The move is a major victory for Microsoft, as the company’s Azure is having a direct competition with Amazon’s AWS. Azure has been trying to increase its share in the cloud market, which has been mostly dominated by Amazon Web Services.
It is still not clear what Bell will look after at Microsoft. Therefore it is most likely that he would not be competing with his old division at least initially. According to reports, he has been listed under Kathleen Hogan’s organization. Hogan is the chief human resources officer and executive vice president of Microsoft. The location inside Microsoft looks unusual given the kind of experience he holds in web services. It is most likely that Bell will move on to another location inside the company in the future. Microsoft has not commented on the development. Bell too has decided to be silent for now.
But the development is viewed as a shot in the arm of the tech giant. This is because Amazon Web Services saw tremendous growth during its tenure. Several top executives of the company have left over the past couple of years. Some of the most prominent names are Jeff Wike, who was CEO of the company’s retail division, and Steve Kessel, who used to head physical retail development of the company. It must be noted that Amazon had in the past filed lawsuits against those employees who went to rival companies. Amazon too has not commented on the development and it would be interesting to see what action the company is going to take in this case.
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