One of many issues we mentioned advert nauseam on the pods final 12 months was how ready the buyer and companies had been to enter a recession. The buyer was flush with money from fiscal stimulus, and companies had been additionally sitting on a ton of money after binging on debt in 2021.
I used to be interested by this concept whereas studying Amazon’s 2022 shareholder letter, emphasis mine:
AWS has an $85B annualized income run fee, remains to be early in its adoption curve, however at a juncture the place it’s essential to remain targeted on what issues most to prospects over the long-haul. Regardless of rising 29% year-over 12 months in 2022 on a $62B income base, AWS faces short-term headwinds proper now as corporations are being extra cautious in spending given the difficult, present macroeconomic situations. Whereas some corporations would possibly obsess over how they may extract as a lot cash from prospects as potential in these tight instances, it’s neither what prospects need nor finest for patrons in the long run, so we’re taking a special tack. One of many many benefits of AWS and cloud computing is that when your enterprise grows, you may seamlessly scale up; and conversely, if your enterprise contracts, you may select to offer us again that capability and stop paying for it. This elasticity is exclusive to the cloud, and doesn’t exist once you’ve already made costly capital investments in your individual on-premises datacenters, servers, and networking gear.
I’m not saying cloud computing can stop a recession, however it might undoubtedly make a downturn simpler to handle. The flexibility for corporations to show the knobs down virtually in a single day has enormous implications for the way companies do enterprise.
