_______________ LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT: AMAZON VS. THE ANTS BY SCOTT ROSENBERG (03/10/99)
	If I were Amazon's Jeff Bezos, I'd be cashing in before the scheme collapsed. It's not one guy in Iowa that's the problem, but the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of guys like that. No single ant's nibble is noticeable, but add them all up and you suddenly have a corpse stripped to bone. Besides, smart business operators know how to grow incrementally, by plowing a portion of their profits back into the business. You hire a few neighbors part time as your business grows, and gradually scale up your server bills. You don't suddenly jump from a $30-per-month Web host to a $5,000-per-month dedicated T1 and Sun server running Oracle. I'm preparing, personally, for the post-bullshit Internet economy. Amazon, Salon and other "burn rate" companies will die, but I'll still be around, earning a modest income and having a good time. -- Robin Miller With his careful debunking of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's "Yippee! Let's go" utopianism about e-commerce and the Web generally, Scott Rosenberg only skims the surface of Friedman's inadequacies. A column labeled, simply, "Foreign Affairs" on the op-ed page of the world's most influential paper should be trustworthy. Its judgment should be sound. It is dealing with political intelligence that may affect, if only tangentially, decisions about war and peace and world economic policies. But Friedman, leaving aside his Middle East expertise, just does not seem up to the task. He is totally swept up in a boosterish and very American vision of a world transformed by globalization. New technologies are absolutely irresistible, and their effects are irrevocably liberalizing, he argues again (and again). Friedman wants to be a groundbreaking iconoclast, but mostly he reads like a graduate student road-testing a provocative thesis that upends conventional wisdom. Problem is, he just ends up sounding silly. -- David Winch Geneva Scott Rosenberg oversimplifies Thomas Friedman's oversimplification. Sure, Amazon has scaled. Sure, they've paid to build the brand. But the Web is something new, while Amazon is more like a mildly novel application of a new technology. They've used the Internet spectacularly to capitalize on existing distribution structures, yes. But they also bring to my mind 19th century pictures of horses pulling carriages along newly laid railroad tracks. What's more efficient is not always most efficient. While that might not be the most appropriate analogy, neither is the example of the New York Times' present and future co-existence with Salon and the Drudge Report. The New York Times produces something. Salon and the Drudge Report produce something. Amazon sells what other people produce. They've been able to disintermediate other intermediates, certainly, but when the technology is mature, who's going to need them? When XML, for example, is firmly in place, and any search engine can efficiently scan every publisher's and every wholesaler's catalog, who's going to need them? If you don't decide to download your books, you'll be able to buy them from Lyle Bowlin, from Yahoo or from a co-worker's stay-at-home spouse who decides to sell books instead of Tupperware. I'll probably buy my books from the local supermarket on the Web, and have them delivered with my local brew. And while the Amazon brand might eventually own that local supermarket on the Web, I'm not counting on that yet. Amazon's investment in Drugstore.com and their bout with Wal-Mart's lawyers just underscores how much old business thinking still controls even the best known of new business models. Friedman's point is still valid: The Internet and the little guy on the Internet are underrated and way underestimated. -- Rob Gunning
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