Victor, remember these words. Amzn is unstoppable.
>Palo Alto, Arkansas
Now what do we call Amazon.com?
Wal-Mart announced Thursday that it's staking its own claim to the Net,
spinning off a separate Internet company, Wal-Mart.com. If the name
isn't a surprise, the announcement itself was, at least according to the
Wall Street Journal, which joined CBS MarketWatch as one of few outlets
to get out a full story Thursday night.
"Unexpected," wrote the Journal's Emily Nelson and Kara Swisher, who
noted that Wal-Mart's site - previously an online placeholder - surfaced
from the depths less than a week ago with a relaunch. All of a sudden,
the company appears ready to do e-business, and the site's wide-ranging
offerings - from travel bookings to potting soil - threaten to make
offline supercenters look like niche plays. So far, no one's expressed
doubt that Wal-Mart can catch up to Bluelight.com, the Net venture Kmart
has begun with Softbank.
As Wal-Mart enters e-commerce in earnest, it's holding hands with
Silicon Valley VC firm Accel, which will take an undisclosed chunk of
the dot-com in exchange for an undisclosed stack of cash, and good
old-fashioned Valley know-how. The retail giant has also elected to base
its dot-child in Palo Alto, Calif., rather than Bentonville, Ark.
Curiously, both the Journal and a Bloomberg report on News.com pegged
Wal-Mart's deal with Accel as a sign of the retailer's skittishness in
jumping into e-commerce. Since when did partnering become cause for
shame? Should Wal-Mart apologize, too, for going to AOL last month to
create a cobranded Internet access service? Others argued that Wal-Mart
was showing signs of Net savvy. It's moving online before it really
needs to do so, as MarketWatch's Tom Bemis noted, since offline sales
are soaring: Wal-Mart Stores reported sales of $24.1 billion for
December, a 26 percent increase from a year ago. Thursday, the company's
stock was trading above $63, just a couple of bucks under Amazon's price
- and that's before Wal-Mart made its dot-com announcement. Those
numbers should be enough to keep Jeff Bezos awake in the dark, worried
that the next pile of Internet cash will create a Walton family
mountain. - L.P. |
