<within 6 months the nascent shoppig mall/bot technologies at yahoo, msn, aol, excite etc.
will overwhelm any one retailer for on line sales -- you need not exert ANY effort to
find the cheapest price ... now i ask you, will any of us care who the actual
manufacturer, publisher, printer etc. is then or our product? let alone the "retailer"
whatever that will mean.>
Possibly I won't care. We shall see.
< second thought, if amzn is supposed to be a bot-- who will use a bot that prides itself on
NOT being price sensitive (bezos' description, not mine). now, let's even assume that
amzn goes with a price sensitive bot -- do you really think that it will outdraw, let alone
dominate the online presence of traditional reatailers (tower, blockbuster, barnes,
borders, walmart, kmart, gap, toys r us, etc. etc) let alone the portals, all of which have
much higher foot traffic, such as xcit, msn, lycos, aol, nscp, yahoo, ...???>
By employing bots, gift matching, etc, Bezos is moving Amazon in the direction of a shopping portal. Of course, Excite, Yahoo, AOL are moving in this same direction.
Then again Amazon may have advantages re: vertical integration. Then again, it will face competition in this regard from WalMart and Barnes and Noble....
To answer Glenn's question, yes all this competition, and its incredible valuation, make Amazon a highly speculative stock. 1999 will see the beginnings of a shakeout in the Internet space. The winners are likely to be the names we all know well. Listed in speculative order: MSFT, AOL, YHOO, yes and even AMZN. Why these companies? Because their management teams have or are proving themselves in this Internet space, vis a vis much of the competition.
I do not consider myself a blind bull. I take all of what the bears say very seriously. One of the main reasons I am here on this thread. Needless to say, these stocks are not (yet) the stuff out of which the Dow Jones Industrial Average is made of. But the potential for appreciation of Internet stocks is too great for me to pass them up at this point.
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