Amazon’s “gasp” profits and the spiral of IBM. Correlation??? High…

Most of you know that I work at Lenovo and in the communications side of things, so watching the tech world is kind of what I do. And this week has been interesting, perhaps even more so than last week’s historical announcement (Dell/EMC).

Let’s take a look:

1. IBM announced earnings this week and definitely missed the marks (kind of already negative marks) Wall St. was expecting. Their stock gets hammered.
2. Amazon announced earnings this week, and they reported a profit (I believe for the second quarter in a row…which is unusual for a company that has been notorious for no profits as they absolutely pour money into growth). Most noticeable is that their Web Services (let’s call it “cloud stuff”) unit is booming, even while they are pouring money into the group.

As you can guess, IBM is a pretty important client of Lenovo’s, so tracking troubles at the company isn’t what I’d call fun. And the growth of Amazon’s Web Services? Well, let’s assume at the end of the day Lenovo is interested in basically selling hardware to every segment of the world’s 7b people and remove my company from the mix.

As a guy in his mid-thirties and someone who works for a technology giant, it’s really interesting to see two different worlds. One world is where a lot of my friends are in tech start ups, steering their own companies, at boutique agencies, etc. The other one is SAP needs XXX hundred thousand units of ______. The gap here is HUGE and growing – and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you who is using what.

Fast forward 10-15 years from now and it’ll be really interesting to see if Cisco, EMC (now Dell), and even IBM are competing in this arena. To me Amazon, Facebook, Google, and yes even Twitter are and will be the new tech giants. Sure 80 years from now we’ll all celebrate 100 years of Amazon just like we recently did with IBM, but someone newer (b/c newer is better right?) will be pushing them out of their space.

WIRED has a really good read on this, and I agree with their outlook 100%. If you have a few minutes, give it a whirl: Dell. EMC. HP. Cisco. These Tech Giants Are the Walking Dead

Now toss in Dell’s buy of server giant EMC (and subsequently their IaaS VMware) and you understand the move. But can a huge…sorry…GIANT, tech conglomerate really be quicker than Facebook engineers locked in a room with pizza and Mt. Dew?

We’ll see.