To understand Amazon in 2011, you have to understand what has happened to the technology industry over the past decade.

Amazon first turned an annual operating profit in 2002, making $64 million on just under $4 billion in revenue. Interest on company debt wiped out that profit, but it was still an impressive feat in a rotten economy, after most of its dot-com peers had crashed and burned.

In our rotten economy, back in 2011, Amazon made $201 million in operating income on almost $10 billion in revenue — in just one off-season quarter.

In 2002, Amazon stock traded at a high of $25/share. In 2011, Amazon’s stock has jumped to a high of $227 per share. It doesn’t matter that its profits didn’t meet forecasts, that its price to earnings ratio is almost 100, and it’s forecasting to earn somewhere between $20 and $170 million next quarter.

In a decade, Amazon’s narrative has been established: as a medium for commerce, its future looks rock-solid.

Amazon’s revenue performance earned it this comparison from Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt (excerpted here by Om Malik):

In 1991, Walmart reported revenue of ~$44B, an increase of 35% over the prior year. In 2011, we estimate Amazon.com will report revenue of $49B, an increase of 43% over the prior year. Amazon.com is the Walmart of our era but it’s better, in our view – Amazon.com is the combination of a technology + logistics company, allowing it to participate in a transition of physical to digital retail supported by a store-less (in Seattle) business model that leads to higher long-term economic returns.

Reading Amazon as not just Walmart, but an evolutionary Walmart, throws a lot into perspective. It explains why Amazon beat Borders and its circa-1991 Walmart-for-books model. It explains our obsession with the company’s overseas manufacturing partners, whether real or imaginary. It explains why Amazon was able to goose sales of its Kindle by shaving off a fraction of their price and packaging them with virtual “special offer” coupons. It explains why buyers are clamoring for an answer to Apple’s iPad, but only if it can deliver all of the same features at half the price.

It also explains why Amazon and Apple both have a real problem on their hands, and why that problem is each other.

When I read Devitt’s comparison of Amazon to Walmart, I flashed instantly to a 2002 Steve Jobs interview with Steven Levy (then at Newsweek, now Senior Writer at Wired).

In 2002, the same year Amazon first approached a net profit, Apple returned to profitability, earning $65 million on revenues of $5.74 billion for the year. (In 2001, Apple lost $25 million. Last quarter, they made $6 billion — yes, more profit in a quarter than total yearly revenue nine years ago.) And in 2002, Apple entered the retail business, opening its first store in New York City’s SoHo.

“I’d rather be us than some of the other guys out there,” Jobs told Levy, referring to the bad economy’s effect on computer makers and the tech industry. “It’s only us and Dell making money. They’re making money because they’re Wal-Mart, we’re making it because we’re innovating.”

Now, Dell was innovative, particularly at its turn-of-the-century height. Walmart was (and is) too. And Apple would eventually come to follow many of the same lines as Dell and Walmart, beating the rest of the consumer tech industry by getting better bulk prices on component parts than its competitors.

But Jobs meant that Dell wasn’t innovative with its products in the way that Apple wanted to be. He meant that Dell, like Walmart, like Microsoft, had no taste. When the economy swung back, and the iPod, Intel Macs, and iPhone took off, Apple roared forward and Dell shrunk back.

Amazon, though, is different. It’s learned from both Walmart and Apple — equally sophisticated in logistics, retail, technology and media. It’s investing in its future, building both data and distribution centers, making partnerships to open new markets in India and elsewhere. Analysts think its Web Services division alone may soon be a billion-dollar business.

Disruptors get disrupted. That’s how this business works. The company that will disrupt Amazon appears to be still somewhere over the horizon. But things change fast; just ask Bezos or Jobs.