To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (119068 ) 3/2/2001 12:59:47 AM From: Glenn D. Rudolph Read Replies (2) | Respond to But the ultimate business model canard is Amazon (AMZN:Nasdaq - news). Third market equity salesman Jeff Bezos actually had developed a good little business in selling books. He could have owned that market by now. However, the company decided to become Wal-Mart (WMT:NYSE - news). The hubris of it all. And it, too, will probably run out of money before it can find out if that vision would ever have worked. In retrospect, there was nothing wrong with Amazon's book-business model. I'm confident that in its last year Amazon actually made money on books, even after all those shenanigans about what counts as cost of goods sold. it was management and its inability to understand execution and finance. The people running these companies misjudged the patience of the market -- virtually nonexistent typically, except for a brief period between November 1998 and March 2000 -- and misjudged how long the money would last. They are still misjudging, as I see many dot-coms and dot-com infrastructure companies presuming that there will be more capital, someday. There's no such thing as a bad business model, there are just bad businesspeople and bad attitudes (meaning managements that want to blame the market instead of instilling discipline in time to save their businesses). Yet part of the great falsehood that was the dot-com era now includes a bogus obituary. I guess it's fitting that the epitaph be equally as fraudulent as the businesspeople behind the ventures themselves."
