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.

销售瓷偶与创立一家云计算公司看似两种截然不同的技能。但创立并且现在执掌着亚马逊云服务AWS(Amazon Web Services)的安迪雅西(Andy Jassy)说，其中一种经历深深地影响了另一种。

“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.

“这是一门难以置信的综合管理速成课程，”他说，意指自己从事收藏品销售业务的时光——他大学毕业后就到了Danbury Mint工作，那是一家销售玩偶、硬币、饰品及纪念品的公司。

“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.

“那些产品长期而言对我不具有吸引力，但那里的综合管理培训和业务培训非常棒。”之后，他创办了自己的项目，接着回到了商学院，再之后就把事业锁定在了亚马逊(Amazon)。在亚马逊，他是杰夫贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)的“影子”——一个介乎办公室主任与技术助理之间的位置。

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——位名叫埃里克多克托(Eric Docktor)的头发斑白的工程师——跟着他进入房间接受我们的采访。

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.

总部位于西雅图的AWS在今年4月开始独立运营后，已成为亚马逊旗下最受关注的事业部。出租计算能力与数据存储的AWS贡献了集团最近一个季度的一半利润。它也是亚马逊增长最快的部门，尽管只占总销售额的二十分之一，但贡献了收入增长的五分之一。

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创立之初，它看起来并非成功在望。当雅西2003年撰写“愿景文件”阐述AWS的经营理念时，他对每个词都再三斟酌，先后修改了31次。不管是那时还是现在，亚马逊的政策一直是：建议书不能超过6页，以迫使撰写者理清自己的思路（并节省读者的时间）。

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.

通过不断修改，AWS的轮廓逐渐浮出水面，而且许多其今天拥有的关键特征当时已经出现。不同于那时的竞争对手，AWS采取“按使用付费”模式(pay-as-you-go)，用户不必支付昂贵的月度会员费。计算平台是自助式的，只要拥有信用卡和亚马逊帐户就可以签约。

“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.

“我们当时针对的是享受不到良好服务的开发者和初创企业，”雅西回忆道。而亚马逊决定成为AWS的首批客户之一，这关键一步意味着自家的零售业务将完全依赖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.

雅西说，在创立AWS时，自己在运营技术基础设施方面缺乏经验却成了一种优势，因为这使得他和自己的团队能够挑战现状。“习惯于不怕提愚蠢的问题非常重要，”他回忆说。

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.

首先遇到的巨大挑战之一是招兵买马组建自己的团队，而且是在不告诉未来员工他们将从事什么业务的情况下进行。亚马逊以保密性著称，应聘者直到被录用后才被告知相关计划。

“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.”

“不让任何人知道我们正在打造什么的确非常重要，”雅西说，“没人想到过亚马逊会建立一个技术基础设施平台。”

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.”

他没有提及微软(Microsoft)的名字，但这家总部位于华盛顿湖对岸雷德蒙德市(Redmond)的科技巨头，显然是AWS创立之初的重点考虑对象。“第一个进入这一领域真的很重要，因为如果一家保守的技术公司建成了这样一个平台并首先进行营销，我们后来再想进入就要难得多了。”

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.

应聘者被告知他们的工作将是为亚马逊的另一项业务扩展应用程序编程接口。这一策略起到的作用甚至超出了雅西的预期，而亚马逊的竞争对手们数年后才意识到云计算服务的潜力。

“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，我也不会认为当时有人会相信我们能够抢先7年时间这样做，”雅西说。

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，竞争对手们已经深知云计算的发展前景。AWS已经到了聚光灯下，而此时几乎所有大型IT公司——从IBM、甲骨文(Oracle)到谷歌(Google)——都很乐意偷走它的一些业务。

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一直处于行业领先地位：研究公司Gartner估计，AWS的计算能力是实力最接近的14家竞争对手计算能力总和的10倍。但微软正在带头赶上。上月，微软的股价涨至15年来的高点，这主要得益于一则消息：其旗下云计算平台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自创立以来首次遇到了至少不得不去考虑的竞争，”Gartner的分析师莉迪娅脠(Lydia Leong)说。她不认为这是一种威胁，但指出，AWS与微软所提供的服务满足的是不同的用户基础。“亚马逊仍是王者，微软只是变得更强大。”

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也面临着来自内部的诸多挑战。在快速扩张的同时保持可靠性就是挑战之一：9月底的一次大断电使得其在弗吉尼亚的数据中心地区停机5个小时。

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.

另一种风险是失去作为分析师圈子中的宠儿的地位。在投资者中，围绕AWS的热情帮助亚马逊的股价在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，假以时日，受AWS用于融资购买服务器的债务结构的影响，这股热情可能减弱。

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.

由于AWS的业务增长非常迅速，其折旧成本——反映因年份和使用而导致的资产价值损耗的资产减记——远低于其资本支出。这意味着，随着增长放缓以及折旧赶上其真正的资本支出水平，AWS的利润率将出现收缩。

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.

或许，当前最大的挑战是文化危机。亚马逊过于苛刻的工作文化开始受到密切关注，起因是《纽约时报》(The New York Times)今年早些时候对其进行了曝光，文章中描述了频繁的冲突以及员工坐在办公桌前哭泣的场景。

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.

已经为亚马逊效力近20年的雅西说，公司的文化对亚马逊而言是一项“真正的竞争优势”，而有益的争论是这种文化的一部分。

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.

他将《纽约时报》的文章斥为“歪曲事实”，但他承认，有勇气发表不同观点是亚马逊风格的一部分。“我们有一个非常重要的文化原则，我们希望人们有不同意见时能在彼此尊重的基础上相互挑战。”他补充说，这些类型的挑战性对话对于AWS早期的一些决策而言很关键。

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.”

亚马逊的快节奏文化是雅西这样的人留在该公司的原因之一。“亚马逊是一个真正像大型初创企业一样运行的地方。它不会慢吞吞的，不会古板僵化，没有官僚作风，我们的动作更加迅速，”他解释道，“这是一种开拓型的文化”。