What would Charles Darwin have to say about the winners and losers in this pandemic?
As the health emergency and the measures we had to take to try to bring it under control are giving way to an economic crisis that is expected to be very severe, if we turn our attention to the large technology companies we find a place where things are going reasonably well, profits are growing or at least are not falling enough to jeopardize anything really important, and the abundance of resources is such that they all look set to emerge from the pandemic stronger, with a greater capacity for innovation and set to steal more ground from those competitors that have been weakened most.
For large technology companies, the pandemic is pretty much an opportunity. Able to send their highly trained workers home overnight and even to ask them directly to stay home until next year, or even forever if they want, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook have found themselves using their products much more extensively overnight, in many cases with unsuspected adoption dynamics even among sections of the population who would not resort to them under normal circumstances. The case of Amazon is especially paradigmatic, because almost all the elements of the pandemic seem to be playing in its favor: with everybody in lockdown, purchases reached record levels and earned more than $10,000 a second.
