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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Roberts who wrote (10618)	6/26/1998 12:36:00 PM
From: Mama Bear	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 18691

"given the run up in the share price, we are lowering our rating to neutral-aggressive" Neutral-aggressive? What? Is that different from Neutral-Conservitive? Neutral-neutral? Where do these people come up with this stuff? Barb

To: Don Roberts who wrote (10618)	6/26/1998 4:39:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 18691

> even after factoring in the powerful attributes of the business model Which has yet to prove it can produce profits. The speculation is that it can, but nobody has done it yet in a mass consumer market. > We are also a big proponent of the future growth of e-commerce Which doesn't imply that e-commerce as defined by AMZN and others is the model that will work. Everybody seems to forget that every medium has developed it's own style and its own model. When Radio came along, it often consisted of a guy reading the newspaper over the airwaves! It took some time before broadcasters took advantage of the immediacy of radio in order to create better programming and different advertising styles. The power of this climaxed with broadcasts like the Hindenburg crash and War of the Worlds. Television started out as "radio with a picture" and didn't really hit its stride until they broke the mold and developed it into something new which could really take advantage of the visual aspect of the medium. The highly visual sitcoms of the 60s led the way and pulled the advertising with them. The model for the internet is not yet known. Display advertising -- borrowed from publishing, with a slight electronic twist -- is not proven effective in any way and probably would not create profits, except that ALL media advertising is at a high right now, so there's room for extravagance. E-commerce as we know it -- mostly borrowed from the catalog business -- isn't necessarily a particularly profitable model either. Just look at the number of catalog outlets that have come and gone over the years. What is the model? Not sure. Probably a lot more than just slapping an internet front end on an existing model. And probably NOT something that will be developed by the existing bunch of players. They are the logical equivalent of the guy reading the newpaper over the radio or the RKO Television Showcase. mg