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

To: AmericanDane who wrote (35533)	1/20/1999 1:22:00 PM
From: Raymund W	Respond to of 164684

Wow, the price action is even surprising me, an AMZN (not most other techs) bear. I still think what's happening is that the smart money (i.e. mostly institutions), having huge paper profits from the recent runup, is trying to take those profits before the stock really tanks. Ray

To: AmericanDane who wrote (35533)	1/20/1999 1:24:00 PM
From: KeepItSimple	Respond to of 164684

>THERE WILL BE NO MARGINS AT ALL. What else do you expect? The market has spoken, and it has said: "We don't care about profits, all we care about are increasing revenues" Since all the executives at these companies couldn't give a damn about the actual business, only the value of their stock options, of COURSE they're going to do anything to increase revenues. Even if it means selling the product at a loss, who cares? Amazon has shown that the investors these days arent smart enough to notice. The analysts have shown they will focus only on increasing revenue and ignore the losses. Of course, this is GREAT for the consumer. I was looking over onsale's new site, and their prices are great, but the selection is a bit slim. I may buy a new notebook from them.

To: AmericanDane who wrote (35533)	1/20/1999 2:35:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

I've talked with OnSales' founder and CEO a few times and participated in most of their ccs. One key difference between the business experience of Jerry Kaplan and Jeffrey Bezos is that Jerry had lots of real world sales experience and understands the mechanics of the marketplace quite well. Bezos, on the other hand, understood the working of networked computers and how that might be harnesed to automate the a process, such as on-line sales. That experience stemmed from his work in the hedge fund business which also enabled him to connect with the VCs and skillfully manipulate the financial structuring of the company and stimulate the stock price. This led to significant differences in how the long-term prospects are perceived and even more to how they are communicated to employees and the public. While Kaplan has anticipated that on-line sales would become highly competitive and that margins would be razor thin, Bezos and company have amplified the fact that the Internet would grow rapidly. Many ANALS have glibly bought into these divergent perspectives - the Amazon would somehow grow large and fat on high margins while the more realistic expectations of OnSale's Kaplan were taken as negatives. Kaplan instead led analysts to expect the fight for profits to be challenging. Amazon could build market share and brand loyalty that would somehow translate into fatter margins than normally expected of any retail business while OnSale would build a business in which they could not translate market acceptance into large margin advantages. I just don't see how any retailer in history has been able to pull off Amazon's mystifying leap of faith.