This is not about 2020, but about right now.

I remember the first story I read about Amazon 10+ years ago. How Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle, set up shop across a bookstore, and sent people across the street to get the books that were ordered on www.amazon.com, so they could be mailed.

Today, Amazon is perhaps the greatest threat to Dell. Not because of the books. Not because they build better hardware (they don’t even build hardware, never mind better hardware). But because for me as a customer, the choices are: 1) buy a box, from Dell, or 2) rent something that walks, and talks, and feels like a box (although it isn’t a box) from Amazon. Whose hard drives don’t fail, whose ethernet cables don’t come lose and for which I don’t need to make sure I have an UPS.

I’m afraid to say that Amazon wins.

If I had to bet on who still exists in 2020 between the two of them, Amazon wins by 90 to 10.

Mystifying bit: why doesn’t Dell operate an EC2-like datacenter today? They got to realize that there are two kinds of computers customers are buying today, and they only sell the old one.