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

To: llamaphlegm who wrote (12576)	8/4/1998 11:51:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

<4. OK, if someone can set me straight and tell me whether AMZN is trying to use junglee to compete with other e tailers or with portals, I'd gladly construct what i think is a good argument explaining why it's dead meat in either case. It's pretty obvious in terms of a portal strategy (unless you want to convince me that they can wipe out whatever portal and or shopping services get set up by YHOO, MSN, AOL, NSCP, et al). The book, cd, video argument has been beaten to death here.> I see a company that was able to enter a sales vacuum and rode some great early momentum due largely to clever branding and the "word Of the Web" (copyright yournetshare) nuclear reaction type effect of their Associates program to the point that they thought a large budget mass-market advertising program was the way to go. The company is finacially structured as a high stakes roll of the dice. They have wound up the company with VC capital, a junk status 10%+ Senior debt vehicle, and now a series of high pay-out acquisitions. The latter was an admission that their early vision of the internet's future was flawed - that the benefit of vendor site branding would be lost as portals sites and web bot technology overtook their importance. <5. ANyone else see a desparate company? First the move into music which according to Bezos himself will not make the margins ever that books will (given the size of their losses/negative margin (i'm making that term up), that's probably a good thing).. > Yes, I agree, Amazon's move has the signs of desperation. Amazon is thinking, IMO, "Web Bots and portals will decimate our profits in two to four years, (the cost of inet advertising and key link tie-in agreements already are taking their toll on profits). We have to either become a portal or figure out a way to turn web bots to our advantage. The problem with these two businesses is that they are both at odds with being a web vendor. Of course it can be argued that that isn't stopping web portals from also getting into these same aspects of business.