The technology sector is often talked about as whether it were a unified front, an easy-to-define monolith. humans say technology stocks rose or technology stocks fell. Tech helped drive a huge boom in the 1990s, and when that collapsed in 2001, tech contributed to the last recession.

In reality, technology companies have about as much in common as Toyota Motor Corp., Boeing Co. and JetBlue Airways Corp. certain, all three play a part in getting you places, but their customers are different, as are their sales cycles and the metrics used to measure their prospects.

When some of the biggest technology names post earnings that week, investors shouldn’t expect one clear picture to emerge. The reports, however, are a revealing proxy for the broader economy.

Two chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc., could supply early evidence of a recovery when they report results that week. They invent the silicon building blocks of computers, cell phones and other gadgets. Manufacturers of those devices are assessing what consumer demand will be several months from now, and their level of confidence can be reflected in the orders they place with suppliers like AMD and Texas Instruments.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is on next week’s list, as is Netflix Inc., the DVD rental service. Strong e-commerce sales and margins at Amazon could point to a consumer spending recovery, although big growth at Netflix could say the opposite: that society are still trying to save by spending more nights at home.

Making the picture harder to read, big technology companies such as IBM Corp. and Google Inc. showed last week that their obsession with cost-cutting is helping them squeeze more profit from their operations. That makes their numbers look good, even though sales are falling at IBM and barely growing at Google considering of the economy.

Here’s…

[Source] dhiram