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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jan Crawley who wrote (85142)	11/24/1999 3:32:00 PM
From: Robert Rose	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

<What do you think? I try not to "under-estimated" any segment of the Amzn players, long or short, for they are the market; the supply/demand line.> As far as analyzing stock supply/demand, that is your dept., Jan. I am moderately bullish on the stock, with a conservative IT target of 120. Only upside-surprising revenue growth will restore amzn's breathtaking momentum, imo. And who knows, this xmas could conceivably deliver that. But I'm not holding my breath. In this sizzling market, there are more promising places to park my $.

To: Jan Crawley who wrote (85142)	11/24/1999 4:33:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

NETTRENDS: Getting the edge in e-business By Dick Satran SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Amazon.com <AMZN.O> is valued higher than the entire publishing industry. Computer booking firms Priceline.com <PCLN.O> and Sabre <TSG.N> are worth more than the largest U.S. airlines. Upstart Charles Schwab <SCH.N> tops Merrill Lynch <MER.N> and the rest of the players in the brokerage industry. With fundamental shifts like this taking place, consultant Philip Evans of Boston Consulting Group said he was "starting to get questions from clients we couldn't answer." So with colleague Thomas Wurster, who also works at the firm, he embarked on a study to find answers and the result, nearly two years later, is the recently published "Blown to Bits" (Harvard Business School Press). The book, an incisive look at how businesses are managing in an information age, offers little comfort for either traditional corporations or the e-commerce upstarts. Anyone trying to create a profitable enterprise will face the same wildly fluctuating values in which a major competitor can be created, or destroyed, almost overnight. Indeed, the authors writing in a current issue of Harvard Business Review outlined "The Doomsday Scenario" in which "it's possible that new navigational businesses will capture all of the value in an industry." Here's how it happens: The digital age has created high-powered "navigators," or search services that can offer consumers both a wide range of choices and a huge depth of information about every choice. Suppliers, retailers, everyone doing business in the industry, must use the search tool, and the rest of the players become commoditized. In the process, Evans says, the navigators have "blown apart" the old rules of marketing, especially the relationship between "reach" and "richness." To understand the rich/reach relationship, think of poor old Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" pounding his lonely sales route through bleak New England -- bringing highly personalized service, an in-depth understanding of his garment line and probably a friendly round of drinks. But with all of this "richness," Willy offered no "reach." He couldn't sell other brands, and other products, just his own company's products. The explosive growth of navigation tools over the past two decades, capped by the Internet's widespread use, has vastly expanded the amount of reach available to consumers and marketers, Evans says. But it's also added dramatically to the breadth, or richness, of offerings, as the adoption of industry standards has dramatically boosted the amount of data available for every sales decision that can be made. XML, or "extensible markup language," the Internet's open standard for presenting data, is viewed as a key element, since it connects the Internet to powerful corporate databases and other rich material, making sales operations that much smarter, both about products and consumer preferences. Through use of XML and other open standards, more and more data that was once locked up in databases, untapped, is being made available to expand the effectiveness of interactive marketing. One such tool is the search engine or directory, like Yahoo! Inc. <YHOO.O>, which spans the vast reaches of the Web's 6 million sites and and delivers rich content. In Evans' view of the world, navigation isn't limited to well-known Internet portals, but includes any company that steers consumers through a maze of choices. This broader definition might include Macy's or Toys R Us<TOY.N>, or even a supplier like Dell Computer Corp. <DELL.O> that operates a well-traveled Internet portal. Companies that act as portals to a marketplace, increasingly are being viewed as the holders of true value, and manufacturing is losing out in the value chain. Evans sites the frenzy of activity in the car business as an example of a business being transformed. "Pure manufacturing accounts for only ...