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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN)

AMZN 229.12

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Nov 26 3:59 PM EST

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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (52515)	4/24/1999 1:40:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) of 164684

The Gartner Group recently issued some results from their Internet think tank: <<Also appearing this holiday season were shopping "bots". These bots can revolutionize online shopping by helping customers find the best-priced items. But they've made no strategic inroads yet, according to Taylor, "there is no official universal standard," he says. "Expect these things to get more powerful over the next few years.">> -What will help the shop bots is the emergence of standards, such as XML (W3C committee) based product and vendor information. <<"More important is the growing presence of online auctions . . . "You can expect auctions to create an even greater sensitivity to price. They give even greater power to the users and create aggregated buying demand." Perhaps of more interest to retailers is the idea of e-marketers . . . An example of this would be the comparison shopping service furnished by Inktomi, a company that provides underlying technology to many portals. Excite offers something similar thanks to its acquisition of Netbot. What do these developments mean for consumes? Bernstein has an answer to that question: "The implication here is that competition for retailers is going to be increasing quite a bit and taking it one step further, you may see that margins begin to decline. The more competition there is, the more prices will decrease.">> Of course this is an attempt to forecast what will happen into the future. But is the stuff that speculators and ANALS are loath to pay attention to at this early stage of the Internet. Instead, it is much more exciting to look at the huge growth rates of e-commerce and somehow extrapolate out better margins and bottom line profits than traditional retail. This will prove to be not only a generous assumption, but downright stupid, IMO, in hindsight five years hence. The implications of "Internet technology" on shifting the power away from the supply side of the equation over to the demand side are inevitable.

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