Jack Ma Of Alibaba To Step Down

jackma Jack Ma Of Alibaba To Step DownAlibaba Group founder Jack Ma made a rather shocking announcement on Tuesday concerning his plans to relinquish his position as CEO, as he had the idea of retirement playing about his mind for a while already. In fact, in June last year, Ma informed journalist Bruce Einhorn and his colleague Frederik Balfour, “Some day Jack Ma is going to retire—maybe not very long [from now]. Life is so short. I don’t want to be 80 years old and still running this company.”

Ma is still very young by CEO standards, considering how he has just turned 48 last year, but in his announcement on the Alizila website, Ma mentioned, “Stepping down as CEO is a difficult decision, for this could be confounding especially for someone of my age who should be at the height of his career. At 48 I am no longer ‘young’ for the Internet business.”

Ma will remain as executive chairman after stepping down, and in his own words, will “focus his attention on setting strategic direction, helping to develop managerial talent within the company’s ranks, and strengthening Alibaba’s social-responsibility efforts.”

So the circle of life continues…

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: DeLorean Hovercraft Caught In The Wild In San Francisco, Verizon Discovers Developer Outsourcing Work To China So He Could Browse The Internet,

Alibaba spins out Aliyun team with $200 million investment, pep talk

Acer CloudMobile with Aliyun

You can imagine that the team building Alibaba’s Aliyun mobile OS must have hurt feelings following Google’s accusations that Aliyun is just a corruption of Android. Alibaba chief Jack Ma is keen to restore some of that wounded pride, at least on the surface. The CEO has used a since-confirmed staff memo to spin out Aliyun as a separate entity that will “safeguard the healthy growth” of the platform and Alibaba’s mobile strategy. It’s not solely an instance of tough love, either: Alibaba is putting $200 million into the new firm and will use executive Wang Jian as a link between the two sides, having him serve as the CTO for both companies. With that in mind, Ma’s ultimate intentions aren’t clear. While the separation may be a sign of a tighter focus on software, it also reduces the impact for Alibaba if anything drags Aliyun down — and either motivation would be helpful for a company devoted to the web before anything else.

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Alibaba spins out Aliyun team with $200 million investment, pep talk originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Sep 2012 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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