Recently in one of his interviews Jeff Bezos cautioned customers avoiding or postponing big buys and keeping the cash as security for good times.  He is no ordinary man and he does not seem to open up this way for communicating method to his madness message as some of his counterparts have shown over the last few months.  In a given market-based capitalist economy structure, it is important to understand what matters and whose voice matter.

• Money matters and people who are wealthy, their opinion matters.
• Knowledge matters and people who are knowledgeable and wise, their opinion matters.
• Power matters and people who hold power – positional or personal, their opinion matters.
• Information matters and people who have better information, who control information, who have the ability to convert information into power, their opinion matters.

We are slowly moving towards an era where data is going to play a major role.  Of course it has always played an important role yet with the kind of technology dominated analytics it has started dominating business decisions.  If data is new crude oil, analytics is a new refinery and the opinion of the owners of such refineries and the source (oil wells) are going to matter much more than perceived.  Data matters and people who own data, who control flow of data, who have better tools to analyse data, can influence opinions, perceptions and decisions.  It has the strength to influence knowledge systems both in their content and delivery.

Amazon Web Services or AWS is known as one of the most widely used cloud-based computing service providers.  And that could be one of the strong feeders to Jeff Bezos who has reasons to sound the way he does.  The data on online shopping trend can help us (in India) better to think about the application of what he is sharing.  Roughly around 8-9% shopping is done online in India as against around 3/4^th in case of the US.  What Bezos says could be true of US economy but I have my own reservation on its seriousness when it comes to India.

The way economic activities have proliferated after the pandemic times is more than the speculations hence the speed could slow down which would lead towards corrections so we need to learn how to go with that flow without having great expectations of fast growth.  Though for many companies pandemic times disturbed their financial performance, yet for tech companies it provided a huge opportunity to respond, grow, expand, capture and capitalise.   These companies went for hiring spree, Amazon alone boosted workforce by 75% during these times.  Now as witnessed in last few months, post pandemic times, most of these companies are laying off their employees citing very many reasons.  Amazon is one such company that has fired around 10000 employees; Meta (facebook), Alphabet (Google), Twitter, Microsoft and many more have joined the list of such companies.  This trend is not going to slow down till the end of 2023.

I would wish to be proved wrong when a feel pushes me to think that could a warning of so called recession be an excuse for Bezos to defend the layoffs.  In the market led capitalist structure nothing is impossible.  In such a structure, controls are left in the hands of market and the levers in the hands of people in power and corporates, as their opinion matters.