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To: ahhaha who wrote (13479)	8/4/1999 3:05:00 AM
From: Jing Qian	Read Replies (8) \| Respond to of 29970

Ahhaha, I don't totally disagree with your assessment that Net may end up to be earning bust. However, I am not as sure as you are about this scenario. I wish you are wrong and Net will turn out to be the biggest Gold pot in history of mankind. However, the latest development is giving me chilling feelings that Net may become a very very important aspect of human life but on the other hand it may not be a money machine. Free ISP access is proliferating. Free Auction will be the next wave to entice traffic. Yahoo is offering free auction already. Amazon is cutting prices of bestsellers below cost to try to increase traffic. And AT&T is mulling ATHM's price cut... I am not sure how companies can make money out of this socialistic phenomenon. Free everything seems to be norm in the Net business. But no, it can't be true. Personally I don't believe advertising can be enough to float all ships. In the end, somebody has to pay, either through subscription fee, or pay a price above cost to buy a commodity. Thinking deeper, the most likely scenario of a future if this free everything movement keep continuing, is that a lot of weaker companies are going to be squeezed out of business. Eventually only a handful of biggies survive. Whoever got the strongest brand, best cash reserve and the critical traffic mass will stand the highest chance of survival. So a few years from now, Net will prosper, but we won't see 100 companies doing the same thing. How AMZN can make money? They still have to charge higher than cost to make money. Maybe at that time, most of the competitors have been taken out or absorbed, so AMZN can start to raise the price of the bestsellers 10% higher than cost. Master Ahhaha, with your wisdom, do you see this happening? What's your long term perspective of the Net economy?