I’m watching public company earnings to identify early trends in the software market to inform startups’ plans for 2023. Yesterday, Microsoft & Google announced earnings. Amazon, Cloudflare, & Mongo announce soon. At last, we see a change in slope in the annual growth rates of the cloud services. Both Google & Microsoft announced growth rates in GCP & Azure that held steady from one quarter to the next. There are two forces in tension : overall cost reduction efforts by companies & the desire to invest in AI.