More than two years into Pandemic Times, technology is more popular, stronger and richer than it was before. Or is it?
This year — and particularly the past few weeks — have complicated what was a fairly straightforward understanding of how most of the tech industry and America’s superstar digital companies were faring.
Repeatedly over the past year or so, my colleagues and I have written that tech was the unquestioned winner of the oddball pandemic economy. People and businesses needed what tech companies were selling, and that increased reliance made stars grow faster and become far more profitable than Silicon Valley nerds could have imagined. Bonkers dollars. A+.
Now I think that grade should be revised to an incomplete. 2020 and 2021 — including more work, shopping, product marketing, entertainment and socializing shifting online — have started to backslide. With hindsight, it’s unclear now how much of the digital surge of those years was a blip and how much was an acceleration of lasting tech transformations.
That uncertainty, along with inflation and weakening economies, make it tough to figure out what is happening in today or even assess the past couple of years. We may be on the cusp of a great time for or the beginning of a rough patch for its products and finances. Let me repeat what should be the mantra of 2022: No one knows anything.
are mostly exuding confidence about their futures, while others are oozing anxiety sweat. It’s almost as if they live in two separate realities. And maybe they
one realm is the land of Big Tech, with emperors like Microsoft, Google, Amazon (maybe), Apple (maybe) and a few others in fortresses looking down on us
Revenue at Google and Microsoft continued to go up from what seemed to be their huge sales of digital advertising and software in 2021. Both companies this week said they felt good about their prospects but also warned of troubles ahead.
On Tuesday, Google executives said the word or a variation of it 13 times in a conference call with investors. The company said it would start to be obvious in 2023 that Google is slowing hiring. Planning a spending diet so many months in advance is a sign that the company doesn’t expect to breeze past what might be a recession in the United States and other global problems.
winners of the pandemic’s scariest phase are also struggling, calling into question whether their heady days of 2020 were partly a mirage.
in the United States and Canada for two quarters. That has made some experts doubt whether online streaming overall can grow as large, as fast and as lucrative as optimists believed. Snap, which owns the Snapchat app, saw its fortunes and usage soar in 2020 before reverting to what it was before: a not-very-successful company with an uncertain future.
Amazon has not been quite so direct, but the company has acknowledged that it overestimated how quickly e-commerce sales would grow and is slashing some spending. (Amazon and Apple disclose quarterly financial results later Thursday.
Meta … phew. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a company switch so quickly from swagger to a bumbling Mr. Magoo.
not? Can I take a long vacation and revisit this question in 2023
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