Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple all announced anticlimactic annual accounts. Amazon reported its first unprofitable year since 2014, while Apple saw quarterly revenue declines for the first time in four years, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, saw a fall in advertising revenue. [Recent layoffs at Big Tech don't spell economic doom - slowboring.com]
It’s been a tough few months for Big Tech, but the industry’s troubles shouldn’t be overstated: Apple, for example, also reached 2 billion active devices, up from 1.8 billion last year and one billion in 2016. The giants still dominate. And as Matt Yglesias wrote, recent layoffs got a lot of attention, but are best thought of as a return to normal pre-pandemic churn rates.
