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

To: tonyt who wrote (44368)	3/7/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: Frost Byte	Respond to of 164684

Ryan Jacobs view of AMZN: Basically, if you bought Amazon and hoping that just by selling books it would be a profitable enterprise, you probably took the wrong approach. And the same way with America Online. If you had bought that early on thinking it -- you know, 20 bucks a month, they'd be able to turn a profit, well, they wouldn't. The question is really: What kind of asset are they building? And at America Online it's 16 million subscribers. How can they leverage that off into other revenue streams? And with Amazon, it's the customers that they've been acquiring, that brand-building. It's that trust they've built along the way with Internet users. Amazon really -- it's their game to lose. They can become the e-commerce destination point on the Web. So, I mean, on that hand it's very exciting, and going forward, I would agree with Brian to some extent that they will dish off in areas where they don't have particular expertise to other merchants, and that's a much higher-margin type of business. They will eventually take advertising on their site, which is a much higher-margin business. Even though they may have margin compression on selling commodity products like books, videos and CDs, there are higher-margin opportunities for them in the future, which still means that their prospects still look pretty bright. And now with this billion and a quarter in new cash, that doesn't hurt either. I think a lot of the offline retailers had the opportunity to kind of sweep Amazon under the rug a couple years ago, but I think they blew it. And now it's Amazon's game to lose.

To: tonyt who wrote (44368)	3/7/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Quote from Mary Meeker on Amazon.com: "In Bezos' words, e-commerce hit an inflection point in CQ4...but that's not enough, the company wants more, more, more, fast, fast, fast - like tens of millions of annuity like customers buying tens to hundreds of different products. Like tens of highly automoated distribution centers around the globe. And yes, how are they going to get there? Spend, spend, spend, fast, fast, fast, fast. It's a classic "spend to the opportunity" endeavor, and the metrics and the instincts are pointed to a very large opportunity." tonyt, It is incorrect. Amazopn's book business was profitable in the month of December according to management. There are no numbers for a month only that we can use to verify this. Glenn