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

To: Rob S. who wrote (14300)	8/21/1998 8:46:00 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Rs<what the hey does comparisons with DELL have to do with Amazongonenuts.com?> Wall Street loves them both, what else can I say?

To: Rob S. who wrote (14300)	8/22/1998 12:01:00 AM
From: zax	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

Amazon's marketing and business plans I challenge anyone here to produce a search on this engine which can find a link to Barnes and Noble or Borders: aol.com What your search will yield, is a message thread entitled "Re: Barnes & Noble - A Thing of the Past". This does not seem coincidental. You will also be bombarded with ads for Amazon.com. The largest percentage of internet users use AOL as their ISP. Mr. Bezos is a VERY clever man and graduated summa cumme laude from Princeton. His attack on the web appears to be to pay off the largest internet hubs and service providers to compell traffic towards Amazon.com. Note that Mr. Bezos has also paid off Jim Barksdale of Netscape, personally, a very large amount of stock in Amazon.com. NetCenter is the preprogrammed default destination on all new Netscape Navigator browsers, which has a (quickly dropping) 60% browser market share, the largest used navigator on the web. Amazon is the exclusive bookseller advertisor on Netcenter. Go ahead... look for books on Netcenter and see what you what happens. Also note Amazon has paid for an exclusive relationship with Yahoo.com, currently the most used search engine on the web. Search for book related topics there, or the competition, and you will ALSO be bombarded with ads for Amazon.com. You will also notice the message thread "Re: Barnes & Noble - A Thing of the Past" as a result of your B+N search, and tons of navigational pointers towards Amazon.com on the sides. We truly have man that knows how to drive traffic to his home page. But this is coming at a high financial cost, and financed in large part with AMZN company stock. Will the plan work? A clear indicator that this plan has fallen through will be if the company's revenues this quarter are flat, while B+N and Borders increase. As Amazon pays more money for every customer than it makes from that customer because of this strategy, and has commitments to continue large payments to AOL, Netscape, and Yahoo for a long, long time into the future, it would seem to me that flat revenues would show that the plan has failed, and that an implosion of the bubblified market value of the stock would soon follow. Amazon has lost money every quarter, in increasing amounts, for the duration of its existence. Would a bull suggest here when they might expect Amazon to start making money? I also find it highly unlikely that Amazon's expensive marketing agreements with these sites include merchandise other than books. Such an agreement would truly be limiting to these "hubs", so I cannot believe that the existing agreements relate to sales of merchandise other than books. Next: The BIG BOYS in the books business are just starting to get their game rolling. 1. Barnes and Noble gaining momentum and coming on strong. 2. Borders, more recently in and on its first lap. 3. Bertelsman, A.G., just coming out of the gate, but incredibly well financed and with an undeniable cost advantage. Personally, I think Amazon is corrupting the web with its business practices, and would truly hate to see this company succeed through practices which diminish our experience in cyberspace. -- Zax