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

To: PAL who wrote (107967)	9/6/2000 12:54:28 PM
From: Gary M. Reed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

It is truly amazing...a retailer of commodity items, with a $16 billion market cap, leaks out info that they might be profitable by Q4 of 2001 and the sheeple jump in with both feet. The PR/spin swing these guys have pulled off in the last 30 days will make for tasty discovery for the securities attorneys next year when things unravel.

To: PAL who wrote (107967)	9/6/2000 6:17:05 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Amazon.com (AMZN: +2.25, 47.94) shares were up this morning. On Tuesday, Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos told an audience at Rice University that the company had goals for profitability but would not disclose them , saying that profitability would come when the weight of the established business is greater than the new ventures. PAl, I read most of the text of the speech on-line somewhere yesterday. I had no time to comment. We have a new "metric." Mature businesses as a ratio to new business. Although, he never stated the mature business had to be profitable. He did say again that books, music and video were profitable last quarter tot he tune of $10 million. That was proof that mature businesses or profitable or something close to that. I am not sure I understood the spech. Bezos is way ahead of me in understanding business metrics. It appears to me that all that maaters is how old the business is not wheather it turns a profit. If one has a lot of products they have been selling for a longer time, then that firm is profitable and doing well. I suppose it cannot get any simpler than that. I quity tring to work out an income statement for last quarter to have books, music and video turn a profit. My accounting skills are not that good. I could not get any profit much less $10 million particularly since sequentially book, music and video sales slowed. I was able to get those items to turn a profit if they had the largest gross profit percentage margin, none needed to been inventoried so as not to take up distribution center space, the shipping boxes were free, there was no human labor to package them to ship, electricity was free and there was no administration necessary for those product lines. I believe my model is not workable. I tried to get my power supplier to not charge me for electricity. They would not agree to that. I can't get my employees to work for free and work does not occur on its own. I can't reproduce the model. Glenn