When Jeff Bezos came to Seattle a little over 10 years ago to set up an online bookstore (before the word 'internet' was a household term), little did he know that his company, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) -- would become the world's largest online retailer.

With a retail product selection that is second to none and an IT infrastructure that rivals any Fortune 500 company's global operations, Amazon.com has done amazing things in the last decade. One of them includes becoming profitable more than a few years ago, way after going public in 1997.

But times change, and longtime Chief Technical Officer Rick Dalzell is leaving the company. Dalzell is widely credited with building the systems that made Amazon the online retailing leader, as well as creating a global computer infrastructure that allows other companies to "borrow" computer time from Amazon for computing tasks (instead of buying computer servers themselves). In a way, Amazon has been a role model for distributed computing practices just as much as changing the face of retailing.Is Dalzell going out on top? Absolutely. The e-commerce function of the e-tailer alone would have been a career crowning achievement, but Dalzell has not much more than that. Try these numbers on for size:

Under Dalzell's watch, Amazon has scaled to:

• $2 billion worth of technology investment
• support $10.7 billion in sales per year
• more than 69 million active customer accounts
• 42 product lines from apparel to video games
• more than 1.1 million third-party sellers
• a growing number of software engineers who are tapping into the computing prowess and Web services the company has developed over the years
• 1-Click ordering
• the A9 search engine
• first-to-market product recommendations, wish lists and order updates

That is quite a list of feats for a decade of work, yes? One of Dalzell's quotes was prophetic and should be the model for any company doing business on the internet. Yet, it's way easier said than done. The immense skill and resources to build upon this next statement would make our collective heads spin if we were all privy to the dirty details: "Very early on, we recognized that we were really in business to help the customer find anything they wanted to buy ... the key was that we were going to need to build a unique store, one that changed all the time, for each individual customer."

One that changed all the time and became a personal visit on every visit -- just those words are amazing. That is, unless there is a physical, brick-and-mortar retailer than changes the store layout and product suggestions every single time you enter the front doors. That is the equivalent of what Amazon.com has achieved under Dalzell's tenure.