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

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (12964)	8/9/1998 12:19:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

The key advantage of on-line date-books, address books, contact managers, etc. is that they are universally accessible and "instant network neighborhoods" can be developed. Some companies will find this to be an advantage but many companies will prefer or require their employees to use VPN implementations of the same types of features plus also having collaborative authoring, planning, and development tools (such as on-line document processing and graphics development) so that content is not under the control of a third party. Also, user database information may not be something that many companies want in the hands of companies outside of their control or may want to limit access to personal use. The benefit to the individual user is in developing personal directories of contacts that can be kept up to date by all parties in the database. That is a cool concept, but I have seen that same approach used by several others. HotOffice and other companies have more collaborative tools than PlanetAll. The stuff that PlanetAll is doing is not as comprehensive. Being simpler, it is better suited for the general public. Amazon.com saw some great early success because they did a good job handling the basics - deliver a clean, easy to navigate web site with usefull product and referal information and back it up with competitive customer service. They aslo were one of the first companies to effectively use "Word Of the Web" ((c) YourNetShare) promotion to build the business. Then they got lots of money in the pipeline that they spent on the mass marketing branding strategy so indicative of broadcast media-mania, muddle-headed thinking. Wrap enough dollars around each book that you sell and someone will pay attention. Now they realize that a mass-marketing appraoch will be overtaken by the speed of connections and interaction of the internet-enabled shop bots. Excite bought Jango, Lycos purchased a shop-bot directory database company for $4MM and other portal sites are either licensing and/or developing their own shop-bot capabilities. Other shop-bot and universal user profiling technology companies are in the works along with new internet standards (like OPS). So they go out and buy a shop-bot company to get similar capability to try to keep up with the next wave of internet communications and e-commerce developments.