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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (56797)	5/14/1999 1:47:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Do you think Yahoo or Amazon or eBay needed IBM to help develop their strategies? No! They paid programming "geeks" with stock options. The companys that waited until now ca hire top notch talent and pay a contract fee. These firms no not to throw money away when the mrket is not ready for the product. They are profit based firms. Glenn

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (56797)	5/14/1999 1:57:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Four years ago there were few tools, and very few good ones, to build ecommerce sites. And IBM, SUN, Microsoft, etc. had not ramped up their ecommerce software or support efforts. The efforts made by MIS departments at traditional companies were not well suited to the Internet. So companies like Amazon who contracted and designed their own ecommerce systems had the field to themselves. Take a look around and see what is out there now - excellent tools to build large ecommerce sites. The server stuff has also improved tremendously - like caching database and most likely page hits in RAM rather than keeping it on disk. The result is that it is a much less expensive proposition to build a better web site today than it was when Amazon got started. Do all companies need to rely on an IBM to build their sites? No. Many can use the tools now available to build highly scaled sites themselves. Figuring out how to do that has gotten a whole lot easier - partly because others can see examples of what works and what doesn't. <<Do you think Yahoo or Amazon or eBay needed IBM to help develop their strategies? >> Maybe not IBM. But Amazon used outside developers that they contracted with for a lot of the early development. A year ago Amazon had a clearly superior web site. I challenge you to argue that advantage today.

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (56797)	5/14/1999 3:11:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Do you think Yahoo or Amazon or eBay needed IBM to help develop their strategies? You should have used Dell to make that point. Dell killed IBM's pc business even though IBM "invented" the software that drives Dells entire value proposition. I guess Dell won't be calling IBM to develop a strategy but Compaq might. <ggg>