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

To: Don Westermeyer who wrote (2796)	4/4/1998 1:52:00 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Netscape isn't really an Internet stock. It's a conventional software company that happens to be distributing the best and the most successful (initially) Internet browser. Like Amazon is a conventional book retailer that happens to be one of the first and the most successful retailers to use Internet as a sole distribution channel.

To: Don Westermeyer who wrote (2796)	4/4/1998 1:58:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

AMZN get an exclusive button on Netscape. It's deal with Yhoo is NOT exclusive: 1/1/98 Searcher 40 1998 WL 10425775 Searcher COPYRIGHT 1998 Information Today, Inc. Thursday, January 1, 1998 Vol. 6, No. 1, ISSN: 1070-4795 Book soup: electronic commerce and the future of publishing. (Amazon.com Inc. taking the lead in selling books)(includes related articles) Lysbeth B. Chuck Two big things happened to Amazon.com, reportedly the Internet's most successful bookseller, in October of 1997. It became the first recorded electronic commerce site to serve a million customers, and it signed an agreement to become the "exclusive" bookseller on Netscape Netcenter's new emmerce section, Marketplace. Netscape Marketplace, a co-branded storefront, is Netscape's long-anticipated move into the growing emmerce business. With Marketplace, rather than just selling software and expertise, Netscape will directly participate in selling products online, either as a vendor, a franchiser, or a virtual landlord. Under an exclusive agreement, Amazon.com has an "above-the-fold" button on Netscape's popular NetSearch page. That provides even easier access to Amazon's 2.5 million-plus titles for the reported 67 percent of Windows-based Web searchers who currently use Netscape. In addition, Amazon will be bookmarked in future releases of Netscape client software and receive prominent marketing and advertising within Netcenter. In return, Amazon will feature book titles and editorial content targeted to Netscape Netcenter's audience. This is another big step forward into the world of true emmerce for Amazon. Just two years ago, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was wrapping book orders in his garage and delivering them to the post office in the family car. Now, he has customers in more than 160 countries and exclusive deals with nearly every major Internet site around -- among them AOL, Excite, the AltaVista Search Service, the Prodigy Shopping Network, and now Netscape. (Amazon has a deal with Yahoo! as well, but Yahoo!, the more experienced Internet entity in this deal, refused to make it exclusive.) Even given his amateur standing in the Internet world, Bezos' is an astonishing success story in the annals of corporate start-ups. Amazon's press releases all stress this success and trumpet the same outstanding set of Internet features: a catalog of 2.5 million titles, "virtually unlimited" online shelf space (get it?), easy-to-use search and browse features, e-mail service, a personalized shopping service, Web-based credit card payments, direct shipping to customers, and an efficient search-and-retrieval interface. Most of the media coverage today slavishly echoes one or another of these points, and there can be no doubt that Amazon has emerged as an unqualified success in the emerging field of electronic commerce. But exactly what kind of success is it? Is it successful because it was among the first companies to utilize the strengths of the Web well? Or because it started out in such a big way, with big ideas and a big budget to advertise? Is it Bezos' financial acumen? Or is it all those factors, combined with some major changes, even some deficiencies, in the traditional publishing industry? This column takes a look at all of that, as well as at some other Internet communities applying other electronic commerce models to the age-old trade of bookselling.