| Hi, Dina here. This week Amazon.com Inc.'s Jeff Bezos took the first step down a path well-traveled by many legendary tech founders—he announced he'll step back from the CEO role, but stay on as chairman to keep his hand in long-term strategic projects. Previous travelers on this route include Microsoft's Bill Gates, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Google's Larry Page—and it hasn't always gone smoothly. For Bezos and his replacement, cloud computing chief Andy Jassy, there are lessons to be learned from others' missteps. Perhaps most famously, Gates and Steve Ballmer spent the first few years of Ballmer's tenure as CEO, starting in 2000, clashing over who was really the decider. As Ballmer told Bloomberg TV's Emily Chang in 2016 about their initial run: "We had a very miserable year. Bill didn't know how to work for anybody, and I didn't know how to manage Bill." More recently, he told me it took until "the year following when we finally figured it out." It's not as if the two didn't anticipate there might be issues—Ballmer says he asked Gates, "Do you really want a figurehead, or do you really want me to be CEO—like, the buck stops with me?" Gates said it was the latter, but it proved tough for them both to put that into practice.
At Amazon, Jassy is no wallflower. Then again, as anyone who's been to a Microsoft meeting or watched a Clippers NBA game knows, neither is Ballmer. The strong personalities and ambitions that helped their rise to CEO may make some conflict inevitable. Still, Microsoft may have learned its own lesson the second time around: When CEO Satya Nadella took over from Ballmer in 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman, clearing the way for the new CEO to truly chart his own course. Ballmer and Gates, at least, both had somewhat similar ownership stakes in Microsoft (5% for Ballmer and 15% for Gates at the time) and neither had more than 20%. Over at Google parent Alphabet Inc., Page and co-founder Sergey Brin's retreat from day-to-day leadership in recent years has been complicated because the two still own special shares that give them voting control over the company. Bezos's 10.6% of Amazon's stock is not a controlling stake—but his 53 million shares do far overshadow the 84,782 shares Jassy reported in a November filing, according to Bloomberg data. Bezos can't let being a bigger shareholder mean his voice is more important than the CEO's. Of course, the shift at Microsoft was more complex because the software company, humbled in the early aughts by antitrust lawsuits and strategic missteps, had entered a period of existential crisis when Ballmer took the helm. Jassy's mandate as Amazon CEO is more about not messing up what Bezos built. But for Amazon to keep growing and leading, Jassy will have to put his stamp on the company and make tough calls, even where Bezos's view may differ. The prevailing ethos at Amazon can no longer be WWJD (what would Jeff do). For this to work, when inevitably the pair disagree on a major strategic decision, it will have to be Andy's Amazon. —Dina Bass | 
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