Amazon’s Retail Side Won’t Be a Side Hustle

Amazon.com’s new boss may come from the cloud. But the executive who helped pioneer elastic computing won’t be getting away from selling books, sweatpants and talking speakers soon.

Amazon announced earlier this week that Andy Jassy, current chief executive of the company’s AWS cloud division, will be running the whole company by the third quarter of this year. Mr. Jassy will succeed founder Jeff Bezos, and thus will be only Amazon’s second CEO in its 26-year history. Mr. Jassy has big shoes to fill, given Amazon’s place as the world’s second-largest public company by annual revenue, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Mr. Jassy’s role with AWS spawned the predictable avalanche of interpretations that the cloud is now Amazon’s most important business. But the numbers suggest that won’t be the reality even in the foreseeable future.