Today after the bell, Alphabet and Microsoft will report their third quarter financial results. Given the wide range of industries each of these companies deals with, their performance will provide us with rich data across different areas of the technology landscape.

The fun continues tomorrow as Meta reports its own results. And later this week, we’ll hear from Apple and Amazon, completing the “Big Five” tech revenue reporting cycle in just a handful of days.

Get ready for a blizzard of numbers.

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Most people don’t like to read earnings reports, dry documents that are an odd combination of canned CEO speech and raw numbers. The board’s commentary is too pre-chewed to mean much, and numbers are just that: numbers on a page.

To help you cut a useful line through the coming numerical flurry, below I’ve outlined five questions australiabusinessblog.com+ aims to answer in the coming days. Our questions are centered around issues affecting startups, so we’ll feed each question and the supporting data points back to tech startups.