Dave Limp, Amazon Hardware Vice President, to Step Down After 14 Years
Dave Limp, the Senior Vice President of Devices and Services at Amazon, has revealed his upcoming departure from the company. Limp, who has been a part of Amazon for almost 14 years, played a crucial role in leading the company’s shift towards producing specialized hardware devices such as Kindle e-readers, Echo speakers with Alexa capabilities, and numerous Fire-branded products. Amazon has a wide range of products in its portfolio.
As for the reasoning behind the decision, Limp simply says “it’s time,” noting that while he’s been with Amazon since 2010, he’s been doing the same basic work at different units like Apple and Palm for 30 years. He’s not exactly retiring in the traditional “cocktail on the beach” sense, as Limp suggests in his blog post that he’ll likely continue to work, just not in the consumer electronics industry. As for Amazon, he will continue for the next few months until he names a successor.
Of course, Amazon’s Devices and Services division saw some serious layoffs last year, and it’s been reported that the division is operating at a staggering annual loss of around $5 billion, according to TechCrunch. It’s easy to blame either of these factors for Limp’s departure, but many Amazon departments experienced layoffs over the past year, not just hardware, and the rest of the industry followed suit. The hardware division is operating at a loss, but there are certainly a lot of Amazon devices in people’s homes, and the company recently announced that it has sold 500 million Alexa-enabled gadgets. Each of these cute lil Alexas keep asking people to buy things, so who knows how deep these hardware sales will funnel into other revenue streams.
However, he is not the first high-level executive to leave the company under CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos two years ago. Other sources have included Worldwide Consumer CEO Dave Clark, Media and Entertainment VP Jeff Blackburn, longtime Amazon Web Services VP Charlie Bell, Global Customer VP Alicia Boler Davis and Global Corporate Affairs Director/former Obama staffer Jay Carney.
