At last the Nasdaq has clawed back what it lost when the tech bubble popped in 2000.
But Amazon, one of its leading lights, is still not making money.
That didn’t matter to investors: founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos quelled any rumblings of discontent by shining a light on the company’s cloud business.
Amazon has been pouring money into data centres and the like, helping other companies handle the internet and benefiting handsomely from increasing traffic through their websites as a result.
The numbers Bezos produced for Amazon Web Services had Wall Street drooling, and no wonder.
Not every Amazon project is a hit. But when Bezos strikes gold he tends to hit the mother lode.
Compare and contrast with Google. Much of its blue-sky thinking seems to be located not so much in the cloud as it is in cloud-cuckoo land by comparison.
Europe’s regulators want to take a bite out of both of them, but Amazon appears to have too many strings to its bow to be badly hurt.
Not so Google. Its core web advertising and search business is under pressure from another direction. Rivals are queuing up to take shots as web browsing increasingly goes mobile.
Don’t count it out, but the prospects for its contribution to the Nasdaq over the next 15 years look rather murkier than they do for Amazon.
