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.
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