Thread by @QuinnyPig

One of the joys of being a publicly traded company is that Amazon gets to (read as: must) file a bunch of annual reporting information, in the form of a 10-K filing. In this thread I'll read through it and summarize the interesting @awscloud bits.

Amazon thinks about its business in three segments: North America, International, and AWS.

The Alexa org presumably yearns to break free into its own business unit.

I've talked in depth previously about Amazon's post-employment non-compete agreements. They're scoped to all of Amazon.

Here's what they view that as covering:

I think "Real Estate" is clear. Hell, "Farming" runs afoul of category 1. Good luck!

Let's not get sidetracked and soldier onward...

If I ever refer to people as "human capital," please put me out of my misery. It's just so... soulless.

This is Amazon's slate of executive officers, not their board. Otherwise this would be the obvious "white board" joke.

One of my favorite parts is the list of risk factors inherent to their business.

Amazon lists a bunch. I'll highlight the fun ones.

The first is "Intense Competition."

Well yes; as previously discussed they do basically everything. If you're reading this, you're an Amazon competitor. Yes, including you, @awscloud employee. There's another service team coming for you!

"Risk from international things" is an entire treatise of things that make it sound like doing a single transaction across a single border might possibly detonate the company to oblivion. This feels just a smidgen overblown.

Data loss and security breaches, systems interruptions and lack of redundancy.

Basically they're reading your own DR manual to you.

This is probably the only time of the year where I get the sense that Amazon as a whole cares about any particular individual employee as more than a fungible butt in a seat doing a job. I really hope this isn't just lip service.

The rest is fairly standard. Let's move on!

"We fired all the whiners before filing this" is probably not how it went down, but it's also not impossible to picture.

Huh. @awscloud owns 14.1 million square feet of facility, and leases another 11.9 million square feet.

I wonder what the dip is?

"Property and equipment acquired under finance leases was $11.6 billion and $7.1 billion in 2020 and 2021, reflecting investments in support of continued business growth primarily due to investments in technology infrastructure for AWS."

I dunno, AWS talking about "decreased prices for their customers" in 2021 maps to... well, not a whole heck of a lot in terms of actual price cuts. Yes yes, new instance families are more cost effective, but still...

The interesting bit towards the end of this is talking about extending the useful life of servers and networking equipment over in @awscloud land.

One thing I didn't expect to see classified as a "marketing expense" is @awscloud sales commissions. Huh, TIL!

EY is their auditor; the only critical item found in the audit and thus included is around the treatment of income taxes.

Yeah, I'm not touching this particular mess.

During 2021, Amazon as a whole spent $496 million on acquisitions. They're very stingy with the M&A budgets!

AWS clearly forgot "and shitposters" in this sentence.

Then a GIANT mess of boilerplate, followed by this. It's wild to me on some level that "I will go to prison if this is materially incorrect" is something people can sign without making a constitution check first.

Lastly, searching the entire 194 page document returns no results for "Quinn," "Duckbill," or "Shitpost," much to my relief.