Will AWS re:Invent break our digital exhaustion?

The past 18 months have been a slog, to put it quite mildly. For those of us that could work virtually, we’ve gotten used to meeting on Zooms and comparing the layouts of different people’s dens.

Waking up this morning, we did something different, and it all seemed to come by instinct. Actually, it started last night when United pinged us to check into our flight. Strangely familiar yet unfamiliar, the sense of Déjà Vu grew more real when traffic crawled into Newark Airport; it took us nearly 20 minutes from getting off the exit to pulling up by Terminal C.

And now we’re off to AWS re:Invent. After about 18 months in the cocoon, we're doing something out of an old routine, painting by the numbers.

We’ve all been through a year and a half where the world has reconvened virtually. Vendor events, which in person were centered around random discussions, became one-way soapboxes, and not much better than death by PowerPoint. It’s just hard to get the big picture when you’re sitting through a bunch of online presentations broadcast at you, with at most, a chat or question window thrown in. Announcements pass right through, in the left ear and out the right. Lacking the give and take of random dialog, there’s just no context.

We’ve seen this in the flow of our business. When the lockdown hit in 2020, clients were desperate for digital content. This year, not so much. A sense of digital exhaustion has set in.

With the onset of COVID vaccines, the world began to reopen for vaxxed and unvaxxed alike – the difference being that the vaxxed grew more confident that they could start living again, while the unvaxxed remained in denial, acting as if nothing changed. And this fall, we saw the gradual reopening of live in-person business meetings. Was it possible that we might all get back together again?

So, what about re:Invent? We’re hearing a lot of chatter about whether, where and when AWS will start getting into the solutions business. This will be the first time we’ll be seeing the changing of the guard. How will things change under Adam Selipsky?

We’re on a plane, masked as we’re writing this. We’re getting used, once more, to intermittent Internet for which you pay dearly for those rarely connected minutes. It’s exciting, but also, with discovery of Omicron, bloody scary. Is the reopening of re:Invent the new norm, or are we going to quickly retreat back into our shells?

We’re heading out to re:Invent looking to rekindle friendships and get those random conversations that come up serendipitously. We’ll hopefully gain more insights having the chance to interact in person. But for all the return to past habits, there are some things that have changed, and we’re unsure of whether we’re seeing the beginning of a new norm. Yes, we’ll have those 1:1 meetings, but because AWS only expects about half the normal turnout, there won’t be any formal analyst program. So instead of broad briefings, we’ll have to rely on keynotes to get the big picture. Is this a glimpse of the future or just a bump on the road?

Probably the answer is the reverse of the old maxim, “The more things change.” Look at Zoom’s stock. It’s currently at less than half of its October 2020 peak, but then again, in the latest Q3 results, revenue was up 35% YoY, with the company on a $4 billion annual run rate – that’s compared to a fraction of that prior to the pandemic. For all the digital exhaustion, even once the world returns to the office, digital will remain part of the mix.