On Thursday, Amazon released a relatively strong quarterly earnings report, with revenues and sales that were better than expected. But soon after, shares in the largest ecommerce company in the world dropped precipitously, down nearly 10 percent at the end of trading on Friday. What gives?

Sunny First-Quarter Results 

For the first quarter, Amazon posted better-than-expected revenue figures, a surge in profit, and earnings that beat Wall Street expectations. The company posted earnings of $108 million (23 cents per share) and revenue of $19.74 billion, slightly beating expectations of $19.43 billion. It also beat its same reported revenue a year prior by 23 percent as sales beat expectations. The company reported profit of 18 cents per share from the prior-year quarter.

The company also said it predicted revenue growth in the second quarter of between 15 and 26 percent compared to the same time last year. "We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start," Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, said in a statement Thursday afternoon, according to Forbes. "Our device team launched Fire TV, offering great content, including our recently announced exclusive deal with HBO, and innovative features like unified voice search, which we're delighted is being adopted by so many new partners, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, Crackle and Showtime Anytime."

Not So Sunny Wall Street Response

Despite the strong revenue and profit figures and Bezos's optimism for the next quarter, Amazon plunged 9 percent on Thursday, resting near 10 percent down by end of trading on Friday. Why doesn't Wall Street like Amazon all of a sudden?

There are a lot of factors at play, including the fact that Bezos admitted in his guidance that the company expected a return to an estimated operating loss of between $455 million and $55 million compared to the almost $79 million operating income in Amazon's second quarter of 2013.

Another factor is that unit sales growth -- the number of items Amazon has actually sold to consumers -- has slowed by 23 percent from 25 percent in the previous quarter. As Slate's MoneyBox mentioned, anemic unit sales growth figures can be a sign that Amazon's various investments are not paying off as expected.

Too Much Future-Talk?

Amazon may just be losing the patience of Wall Street though. Amazon has a history of spending on future technology and investments -- recently it has spent heavily on cloud-computing offerings, new hardware like the Fire TV set-top box, shipping deals, and on investing in countries with high growth potential, like Spain, Italy and China -- to the detriment of its own profits. Focusing less on profits has its upsides, like the fact that it can eviscerate the competition with a wide selection of extras like free delivery, membership benefits like Amazon Prime video services, and a huge selection at low prices.

But investors only have so much patience for future talk and anemic profits, and Wall Street might be giving Amazon a not-so-subtle hint to focus, at least a little bit, more on the "now." That might be a cautionary tale for other tech companies that recently at least seem to have their eyes more firmly focused on the future than the present.