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

To: Mark Fowler who wrote (36220)	1/23/1999 1:49:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

<i haven't seen any etailer come close to Amzn's ability.> What specifically are you talking about here? What key "technology" does Amazon have that other e-tailers either don't have, can't buy off the shelf, or can't develop for relatively low cost as compared to typical corporate outlays? I challenge you to point out some major technology factors so we can debate them. Maybe there is some voodoo Internet technology that I am unaware of. Amazon has an excellent web site and has done a superlative job of building in the background support systems and staff needed to handle increasing flows of business. Bezos got the formula right for starting up Internet e-commerce - a beautiful job or anticipating demand and building well targeted capability to handle it. This was not a trivial accomplishment by any means because during the early going there were few yardsticks to go by. Bezos correctly ignored the early advice of those from the traditional media industries to flesh out the site with lots of graphics, music, animated gifs, flash, video, etc. While many others were prejudiced into thinking that flashy graphics and stuff would win over customers, Bezos kept Amazon focused in the direction or giving customers a crisp, enjoyable experience and the information they needed to make better informed buying decisions. Anyone who looks at this must give credit were credit is due. Amazon has succeeded admirably by keeping focused on the customer's experience. Let's think of traditional business people as being a bunch of stuff shirts who "just haven't gotten it" about the Internet. To a good measure they have been. The majority are still pretty clueless about the potential of the web and how to best take advantage of it, IMO > a step-wise process highly dependent on the feasibility of currently deployed bandwidth and other related technologies. While I agree that Amazon has done a great job in the early going and that corporate leaders as a whole are steps behind, I do not agree that Amazon has a "Internet technology" lead. There is a multi-billion dollar software industry that has been hard at work in an extremely competitive environment to put together incredible tools to make web development much easier and less daunting of a proposition. There have also been many brilliant people who have been hard at work analyzing the nature of this organic Internet and devising strategies to become competitive based both on the new media and on their clients or company's unique products and delivery systems. All this adds to the emergence of competition that will deliver a dazzling array of products and services. When Bezos started out developing his business, he had one choice: to build the site from scratch on a UNIX platform. Since that time many integrated tools and analysis software are available to build sites on several flavors of UNIX and MS NT environments. Much or most of the custom coding is no longer necessary or an advantage. As far as capabilities such as those acquired from Junglee or PlanetAll, several other sites have duplicated similar and developed other customer-oriented capabilities.