Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: dbblg who wrote (95607)	3/6/2000 3:05:00 AM
From: KeepItSimple	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164687

You want open questions- how about the biggest fraud of them all? B2B. The insane valuations are based on the argument that corporations, giant and small, will allow these third party companies to insert themselves into their supply chain and leech off a percentage of the profits on each transaction, however small. After all, the con-game goes, if Commerce One can extract just 1 percent of the estimated 10 trillion dollars of B2B commerce, then surely a 100 billion market cap is justified. Unfortunately, they're dead wrong- this type of "service" will become akin to telephone service. AT&T doesn't get even the smallest fraction of Ford's sales even though up until now most of the suppliers used a telephone or fax machine to communicate bids and inventory issues. All these hundreds of B2B companies, which are in most cases nothing more than webpages performing auction/inventory procedures, are simply going to be sold as software that a company buys once and updates regularly. Microsoft doesn't get a cut of the profits if someone uses Word to write a bestselling novel- unless you define "cut" as paying the purchase price of Word. Of course, the analyst community and the B2B companies HAVE to predict that the "insert into revenue stream" method will prevail, otherwise their market caps don't have a prayer of justification. In the end, these stocks will be destroyed just as many B2C stocks have already been. But before that happens, you can be sure the insiders and analyst community will have dumped billions of dollars worth of stock into the bag-holding public hands.

To: dbblg who wrote (95607)	3/6/2000 9:22:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164687

First-mover advantages are proving insurmountable for free services. Let's change that slightly to free services that have a form of 'lock.' For example, it's a pain to change your email address. It's not a pain to change what news site you read in the morning. I'm betting they will be similarly valuable for anyone selling low-dollar-value items like AMZN in books/music, etc. "Bad bet," says the Bearish Bearded One. BottomDollar an DealTime will not go away--- even if the websites do go away, software to handle comparison shopping won't. What advantage has Amazon's front-runner status given it other than the opportunity to lose more money than every other store combined? All the internet value-item stores have turned out to be mail-order firms in disguise, but will be less profitable. Bigger-ticket items are more problematic--which is one of the reasons I was unhappy w/AMZN's move into electronics. People like to actually see the television set they're going to buy. They also like to be able to bring it in for repairs. On the other hand, this makes sense for business purchases, which is why Dell is successfull.