well all
william and mark fowler may have won the investment contest to date (we'll never really know), but certainly lost either the
fundamental analysis debate
and/or
the integrity points
as they either believed the intellectual taffy they tried to pass off as nutritional food with substance, or will simply trying to dupe more imbeciles into buying this patheticly overvalued company ... fyi everyone, and i do mean everyone, still thinks of of amzn as a bookseller -- and that's what all its publicity is about --
will the last idiot to buy this stock at $150-$200 please turn out the lights on the way to the trailer park, home of your new accomodations (it may be this week, month, or year, but the times they are a changing)
and for old times sake, a llama reference (bulls, don't bother, it's a reality check, as if more were still needed)
Print Edition
Business Articles
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Trailing Amazon, but Catching Up
By Leslie Walker
Thursday, January 14, 1999; Page E01
Welcome back, gentle reader.
(If you're not a gentle reader, click here .)
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing "Welcome back, Leslie
Walker" on the Amazon.com home page every time I shop for books. It
shows that the computers of Big Brother Bezos (that would be Jeff Bezos,
Amazon's founder, whose personal stake in the online bookseller is now
worth more than $10 billion) are watching my reading habits and
presenting me with titles they think I'll like.
You may be wondering why I keep going back. I guess I thought Amazon
was simply the best. Recently, though, I decided to give Barnes & Noble's
Web store another look, after a few of my wired friends said they had
shopped there but didn't find it . . . well, webby enough.
Not webby enough? I paid a visit, made a purchase and found the site
surprisingly deep. The next time I went there I was shaken down to my
snobby Internet roots: Welcome, Leslie, it greeted me, just like Amazon. If
you're not Leslie, click here.
Feature for feature, service for service, discount for discount, even
annoyance for annoyance, Barnesandnoble.com has become a close match
for Internet pioneer Amazon.com. In recent months, the nation's largest
bookseller has added significant amounts of editorial material, new titles,
one-click "express line" purchasing and a speedy way to buy out-of-print
books. Its shipping fees are identical to Amazon, and, yes, its computers
make personal recommendations.
Barnesandnoble.com still lags in site performance -- I got two "server too
busy" messages -- and fewer readers seem to type in reviews than at
Amazon. But I found the Barnesandnoble.com experience stronger in other
areas, such as browsing by topic and finding rare books.
All in all, my new-found respect for Barnes & Noble underlines how much
faster commercial enterprises can evolve on the Web than in the real
world. Competitive advantages can evaporate almost overnight.
Amazon.com went online two years ahead of Barnes & Noble -- so how
far ahead is it in attracting visitors? Between September and November,
Amazon's audience increased by less than 40 percent, while
Barnesandnoble.com's more than doubled. Amazon had nearly 8 million
visitors in November to B&N's nearly 4 million, according to Media
Metrix, the Web's leading traffic-measurement firm.
Amazon has a much larger sales lead because more of Amazon's visitors
are buying, a fact born out by the higher number of pages viewed by each
visitor. But Barnes & Noble is hoping its low buy ratio is related to how
long its shoppers, generally less Net-savvy than Amazon's, have been on
the Web. Research shows online surfers like to browse for six months or
longer before buying.
You may be wondering: Does Borders, the other big national bookselling
chain, even have a Web site? It does, but it's an infant, less than a year old.
By Media Metrix's count, its traffic stayed almost flat at 300,000 people in
November, although its executives say their traffic logs show bigger
numbers than that.
If Barnes & Noble has jazzed up its online store, why is Amazon still
getting all the buzz? Could it be reverse snobbery -- that heavy Internet
users have adopted Amazon as one of their own and look down on Barnes
& Noble and other real-world retailers as foreigners who don't "get"
cyberspace?
By now, I think they do. Barnesandnoble.com started life with bright-green
pages to match its traditional store colors, but it recently adopted
Amazon's muted green, which bespeaks the Net's utilitarian culture. After
three big redesigns, Barnes & Noble's site retains attractive features
traceable to its creation in May 1997 by the Web's most famous designer,
Roger Black.
While both search engines respond well to imprecise queries, Barnes &
Noble's goes deeper. When you search for a title it doesn't stock, Amazon
proudly brings up a page saying it will "query our network of used
bookstores for you and send an update within one to two weeks."
That has been bested, in my opinion, by Barnes & Noble, which does a
simultaneous search of used-book dealers and allows you to buy used
books on the spot. For example, it instantly found original "Noddy" books
that I loved in my childhood, including "Noddy and His Magic Rubber" for
$37.50 from a store in London. Not bad.
So can Barnes & Noble catch up to Amazon, which, among other
advantages, has a network of more than 140,000 online affiliates -- Web
sites that collect commissions for each book buyer they refer? Barnes &
Noble has just 50,000.
Executives at both Borders and Barnes & Noble say they are gaining
ground. Borders is planning heavy cross-promotion with its physical stores,
although sales-tax rules put limits on that by imposing a tax on Web sales if
the real-world stores do too much promotion.
Barnes & Nobles made a bold move by announcing it will buy the nation's
largest book distributor, Ingram Book Group, which would allow it to
knock a day off many book deliveries. Barnes & Noble officials also say
they are going to marry their bookselling expertise to technology and go
much deeper this year into the technology championed by Big Brother
Bezos: personalization.
Goodbye, gentle reader. Since you read this, may we suggest "Bridget
Jones's Diary." It's irrelevant to the Internet, but funny novels may be our
best response to a world increasingly run by machines.
Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.
Walker will host a live Web chat today at 1 p.m. with Kevin Kelly,
founding editor of Wired magazine and author of "New Rules for the New
Economy," an examination of how networks are transforming business. To
participate, go to www.washingtonpost.com.
Online Bookstores
Amazon.com leads in online sales and market valuation even though the
nation's biggest bookstore chains have much greater offline sales.
Company Market Visitors to Avg. number
valuation Revenue* Web site** pages viewed
(in billions) (in billions) (in millions)per visit
Amazon.com $23.43 $0.42 7.8 7.7
Barnes & Noble$2.72 $2.98 3.7 4.3
Borders $1.45 $2.51 0.3 5.8
*for the past four quarters
**in November 1998
SOURCE: Media Metrix
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company |
