Amazon Employee Count Soars Above 100,000 Surpassing Microsoft

We know that bigger no longer equals better. Having the most sales or the most locations or the most employees is no longer a defining or determining factor in an era when technology makes every small business a David to the mega-enterprise's Goliath.

But still, size does convey something about prospects and performance.

So the fact that Amazon now has over 100,000 employees - not counting seasonal workers - is potentially instructive about the future of business. To put it in perspective, however, it is worth noting that Foxconn has 840,000, IBM has 433,000, Samsung has 371,000, Hewlett Packard (!) has 331,000, Dell has 106,000 and Microsoft has 90,000. Given that HP, Dell and Microsoft are in a perpetual state of decline - if the press and their contemptuous competitors are to be believed - crossing that 100,000 threshold is not necessarily good news.

What it does suggest, however, is that ecommerce is a significant economic force (yes, d'uh: we get it) and that the infrastructure necessary to maintain and expand on that base is now in place. The question is what this portends. The irreducible logic of being a public company means grow or die. So the concern is that Amazon, like Microsoft whom it has now surpassed as Seattle's biggest employer, will face those same laws of big numbers with which previous tech titans had to wrestle and which often seemed to signal their loss of initiative, if not doom.

On the plus side, however, because of the role which convergence plays in the economy generally and in retail specifically, the world is full of possibility. Because there is one stat of interest to Amazon and those who believe in its future that we have not yet mentioned: the real competition in global commerce, a firm called Walmart? Yeah, it has 2,000,000 employees. Onward and upward. JL

Blair Frank reports in Geekwire:

Amazon’s growth shows no sign of slowing down.

The company’s quarterly earnings report today shows Amazon blowing past the 100,000-employee mark with 109,800 full-time and part-time employees on its books worldwide as of Sept. 30. That’s an increase of more than 12,000 employees from the second quarter.
In fact, Amazon now has a larger direct workforce than the region’s other tech giant, Microsoft — whose employee count also moved into six figures for the first time in the recent quarter, with 100,518 employees worldwide.
It’s not a perfect comparison. Amazon’s employment number includes not just those developing and supporting its products, but also employees fulfilling orders in its warehouses, which makes its workforce different than many traditional tech companies.
Neither Microsoft nor Amazon includes temporary or contract workers in its public employee count.
Amazon has more than tripled in size over the past three years. Its s meteoric rise in employees is driven in part by expansions in the company’s warehouse network, which has been growing around the country. The company has been opening new warehouses left and right, including one in Tracy, Calif., which may be the site of the expansion of its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service in the San Francisco Bay Area, and plans to open more domestic warehouses this year.
Amazon has also been working hard to expand fulfillment overseas, including its rapidly-expanding marketplace in India. One of the company’s strengths is its ability to rapidly deliver goods that customers order, so it’s no surprise that Amazon is looking to build on its employee base in that way.
Amazon is also expanding its presence in its hometown of Seattle, with a new campus in the works on the northern edge of downtown. Amazon doesn’t disclose the number of people it employs in the Seattle region. Microsoft has just under 43,000 people in the region.