4 ms·

>I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake I think the exact opposite; buying stocks without knowing how much you are paying for profi

>I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake I think the exact opposite; buying stocks without knowing how much you are paying for profit is a mistake. >It's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks. 10 years ago Apple revolutionized the tech industry with a cell phone. Now they aren't a tech company? >If you did your same math, could you have expected or predicted Amazon's AWS success? Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services market, and were taken by surprise by the success? I'm not saying it's easy, but being tricky is no reason to ignore using what data we have.

simonsarris 10y ago
> Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services market, and were taken by surprise by the success? Yes. The project was born out of Bezo's edict early on in the creation of Amazon that everything the company does internally must be able to be turned into a service. Almost every analyst in 2006 was against the idea and Bezos admitted it would not be a forseeable revenue stream: > Stifel Nicolaus & Co. (SF ) analyst Scott W. Devitt notes: "There's not going to be any economic return from any of these projects for the foreseeable future." Bezos himself admits as much. ... "We think it's going to be a very meaningful business for us one day," he says. "What we've historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three, five, seven years." From this 2006 story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezo... In 2011(or 2010?) AWS revenue was still listed in the "Other" column on their 10K, even though it was by then their #1 area of growth. So yes, I think the scale of the success surprised them. It certainly surprised analysts who think like you do, nearly all of which expected AWS to be something between a hobby and a folly (read the Bloomberg article).

simonsarris 10y ago

> Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services market, and were taken by surprise by the success? Yes. The project was born out of Bezo's edict early on in the creation of Amazon that everything the company does internally must be able to be turned into a service. Almost every analyst in 2006 was against the idea and Bezos admitted it would not be a forseeable revenue stream: > Stifel Nicolaus & Co. (SF ) analyst Scott W. Devitt notes: "There's not going to be any economic return from any of these projects for the foreseeable future." Bezos himself admits as much. ... "We think it's going to be a very meaningful business for us one day," he says. "What we've historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three, five, seven years." From this 2006 story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezo... In 2011(or 2010?) AWS revenue was still listed in the "Other" column on their 10K, even though it was by then their #1 area of growth. So yes, I think the scale of the success surprised them. It certainly surprised analysts who think like you do, nearly all of which expected AWS to be something between a hobby and a folly (read the Bloomberg article).