course, Ballmer had little grasp of how Amazon’s eventual engine of profitability, Amazon Web Services, was performing—and that was how Jeff Bezos wanted it. Over its first decade, AWS’s revenues and profits were a closely guarded secret. The division generated $4.6 billion in sales in 2014 and was growing at a 50 percent annual clip. But Amazon disguised those numbers, along with nascent advertising revenues, in a sundry “other” category on its income statement, so that potential competitors like Microsoft and Google would not recognize how attractive a business cloud computing actually was.
