Wow, turns out cloud sales can slow down – eh, Amazon, Google? Cloud giants Google and Amazon Web Services' latest financial results indicate the cloud computing adoption is finally slowing as customers press pause amid the economic downturn taking place across much of the West. Amazon Group's overall sales grew 9 percent to reach $149.2 billion in the fourth quarter, while its AWS sales …
It always amazes me how growing less than last year (note not a loss or even no growth, just less of a growth) is seen as a disaster and requires $changes.
What exactly is wrong with continuing to make billions in profit? Guess that's why I'm not making the big bucks!
All the business schools brainwash all the MBAs with the mantra of "Continual growth, at any cost!". So it's been now for 25+ years that if you're in the upper chambers of business and it's not growing year on year then you have failed badly, so quit your job and move to a new company. Making profit is simply not enough, it must be exponential growth, year on year no matter what it takes.
With contious changes at the board level no wonder so many companies fold, leadership is in continuous churn and stability is thing of the past.
Some of the big wheels probably do understand the growth situation, and realize it's fine.
However, they want to re-exert control and re-gain the upper hand over those uppity workers who want a decent wage, healthcare benefits, and [gasp] to WFH where and when it makes sense. Like they did for the past 2-3 years for the company, sometimes towards record profits, mind.
Hence the $changes. And in this case, the very public declaration of the so-called need for layoffs, because economy, or something.
Exactly, but unfortunately so many hedge funds are tied to the companies, like the knob that owns lots of Google shares so told them they needed to fire more people. Doesn't matter that he's already making a shit ton off them, he just wants to make more. And that is the issue, the investors.
If you're a company with an in house tech team, cloud becomes too expensive after just a few hundred VMs.
If you're a startup and happily running from the cloud, you'll never know this and as your company grows, you'll just get raped more and more by the provider who had already locked you in from day 1 with their platform tools.
What I've never understood is where this eternal growth is supposed to come from... Sure, in the 60s, there was a boom in the productive workforce and thus disposable income in society, so increased revenue was almost a given.
But in an age where there are fewer and fewer wealthy people entering the marketplace and with even fewer predicted in the future, how do companies expect to continue raking in the money?
Recent data from the US (and not to mention the UK, the only G7 economy to show actual direct decline) has indicated the largest drop in "relative disposable income" since the Great Depression almost a century ago.
We have seen tech companies' and the energy market's approaches: Increase the price of equivalent or lesser products and reduce availability.
Hence the fact that companies are ratcheting up the price brackets to compensate for losses in sales volumes even while raw costs are starting to fall. (Energy being basically non-elastic is especially egregious in this respect).
But that is eventually self defeating since it mearly redistributes finite expenditure elsewhere. Add this to the reality that even what actual money there is now more and more tends to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: the hands of the owners themselves rather than their customers'.
Thus at some hypothetical point in the future, there will likely be more money within the special club itself than outside and options for future growth will become increasingly sparse, if not entirely absent.
Here's a few sobering articles:
https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/gdp-report-reveals-ominous-great-depression-warning-sign-not-seen
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press-releases/articles/consumer-disposable-income-confidence-falls-to-record-low-as-rising-cost-of-living-takes-hold.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/30/groundhog-year-uk-disposable-incomes-to-fall-by-38-in-2023
I have been wondering where al this jockying around is ging to end up as well. I had no ideas it was so stupid of these big wig bosses to expect expenetial groth each year. I can just see me expecting the same kind of groth in my salary each year; they wold either shoot themselves or shoot me.
Do you think they will wake up in time to smell the roses?
Yes, but the profit on selling diapers vs the profit on selling software is pretty significant. The revenue number just means they sell a lot of volume in a low margin business.
AWS though, has an enormous profit margin, because all these PHBs and PHBs that used to be devs are convinced it's the only option going forward, I mean, all their friends are doing it, so it must be right.
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