Competition?
Declning margins?
few switching costs?
New "traditional competitors" coming on line?
Split increasing float?
Another round of insider selling?
Barnesandnoble.com IPO?
Borders finally getting its s--t together?
Bertelesmann locking up European market share with AOL links and massive ad budget?
Time Warner negotiating to buy cdnow-ntki?
Columbia House's "Play" website for its erstwhile mail in club?
Shopping.com
Buy.com
Mysimon.com
pricescan.com (now remind me again -- why don't i just amazon to suggest books to me when i'm just browsing, compile the list and then have the bot find me the cheapest source (it's literally NEVER been amazn as gomez' survey confirms)???)
yahoo.com (anyone ever go there? they probably won't have anyone using their bots)
aol.com
msn.com
nscp.com
continued newspaper references to "amzn, the online book seller" or maybe the "online book and music seller" reinforcing its brand "image" in a limited market niche
v.
more bezos' hype the same announcement over and over again
annoucing a software store (what are they waiting for?)
a few more acquisitions
lions and tigers and bears oh my
good luck to all with those dieting and quit smoking resolutions 8-}}
December 31, 1998
Tech Center
Steve Case's Three C's Give Way
To New Media Formula for AOL
By KARA SWISHER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When he was just an up-and-coming mogul, America Online Inc.'s Steve
Case plodded from one industry conference to another reciting his formula
for new-media prosperity. Three "C's" (community, communications and
context) would bring users to the nascent online business in droves, he
preached.
It seems Mr. Case was right. AOL now dominates cyberspace and its
recent agreement to buy Internet pioneer Netscape Communications Corp.
has set the new-media world clucking about the "C's" for the coming year.
The consensus, based on a series of conversations with people across the
Internet community, is that Mr. Case's three will give way to nine "C's" and
a "P" in 1999:
Commerce
Martha Stewart knows a trend when she sees one, which is why she
cuddled a computer on a recent Newsweek cover about online holiday
shopping. Electronic commerce is growing at an astonishing rate.
But even if it mauls the mall,
e-commerce faces some ugly facts of
the retail world that not even the
efficiencies of the Internet can ignore:
the difficulty of maintaining margins in
vicious price wars, the constant need
to feed the marketing machine and
the inevitability of competition.
Yet some interesting trends are
emerging, including the move into
new categories of mainstream products following the success of book and
computer retailing online. The New York-based Jupiter Communications
research firm, for example, estimates that online clothing sales will more
than triple to $330 million this year from $103 million in 1997.
Customer
Most Internet executives seem positively frantic on this topic: It's the
customer, stupid. Now that they have gotten your attention, how can they
hold on to you? Many say the goal for 1999 will be how to increase the
number of "hooks" online companies can sink into a user. Among them:
free e-mail, "electronic wallets," Internet calendars and Web-based date
books. That's because, says Julie Wainwright, chief executive officer of
Reel.com Inc., an online video seller, many Internet users are still
"samplers."
"Developing that relationship with the customer over the long term is
something that we all need to focus on," she says. "While there is still
enormous growth, keeping the customers we have will become increasingly
key."
So expect everything from frequent-flier rewards to more integration
between browser software and major sites to catch and keep customers.
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