(1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all.
(2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce business unprofitable for a long time - something shareholders would not be happy about. Buying a business and allowing Marc Lore to make those decisions was, in a way, some nice sleight of hand.
The acquisition blindsided the eCommerce CTO. DD was done out of Bentonville and was rumored to be partially done by a SVP at Google.
The tensions between the profitable brick-and-mortar business and eCommerce _grew_ after the Jet.com acquisition. It ultimately led to Greg Foran resigning in protest to how much money was being tipped down the drain trying to compete with Amazon (that is massively subsidized by AWS).
Walmart make their fair share of mistakes. They have had periods of incompetence at scale in some areas. But they aren't afraid of making tough and interesting decisions. That I can respect. If you think running or working for a startup is hard, try thinking through re-orgs and strategic re-alignments at the scale of Walmart.
I agree with all of these statements. JK IMHO set their e-commerce business back 3 years at least. He was the champion of a horrific monolith that was delivered years late.
Not quite sure what you are referring to in terms of making changes that would make e-commerce unprofitable for a long time.
Your last point I agree with as well- I often felt they were far too conservative- mid-upper management was often overpaid for their ability and thus it was in their best interest to not rock the boat too much and protect their fiefdoms and thus their jobs.
At a crude level: To compete with Amazon means running eCommerce at a loss just like Amazon do. AWS subsidizes Amazon eCommerce, brick-and-mortar subsidizes Walmart eCommerce.
It is more nuanced than that of course but at a high level that is a big challenge to profit.
RE: JK.
He surrounded himself with a handful of smart technical VPs and lots of dumb ones that he held close. The good ones eventually left and the dumb ones stayed. The replacements were a mixed bag. The tension between JK and the more successful business and technical unit (mobile) siloed under a rival executive was healthy for a while then when the axe fell on mobile, it was a disaster - lost a lot of good people.
Heh I had almost forgotten about "mobile" and that tension. My focus was always on fighting against Pangaea, which was related, but when they folded mobile I found it to be a reasonable decision- the time had past where having a separate org just for mobile apps didn't make sense in a responsive world. I just checked and there is still a "mobile alumni" group on FB, though it hasn't been active in 2 years.
(1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all.
(2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce business unprofitable for a long time - something shareholders would not be happy about. Buying a business and allowing Marc Lore to make those decisions was, in a way, some nice sleight of hand.
The acquisition blindsided the eCommerce CTO. DD was done out of Bentonville and was rumored to be partially done by a SVP at Google.
The tensions between the profitable brick-and-mortar business and eCommerce _grew_ after the Jet.com acquisition. It ultimately led to Greg Foran resigning in protest to how much money was being tipped down the drain trying to compete with Amazon (that is massively subsidized by AWS).
Walmart make their fair share of mistakes. They have had periods of incompetence at scale in some areas. But they aren't afraid of making tough and interesting decisions. That I can respect. If you think running or working for a startup is hard, try thinking through re-orgs and strategic re-alignments at the scale of Walmart.