jan 18 p2

Amazon.com: A Champion Online Money Loser How an Internet Marketing 'Wizard' Went Wrong
January 03, 2005 adage
As part of its 75th anniversary celebration, Business Week is profiling the greatest innovators of the past seven-and-a-half decades.
In its Dec. 20, 2004 issue, the magazine spotlighted “The Wizard of Web Retailing,” Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. Which prompted us to take a closer look at Amazon.com
In the decade since its founding in 1994, Amazon.com has racked up $17.5 billion in sales. Currently its stock market value is $16 billion. And according to Business Week’s annual survey of the world’s 100 top brands, Amazon.com is No. 66 with an estimated value of $4.2 billion.
$3 billion loss
Not bad, except for one thing. Amazon.com doesn’t make any money. In the past decade, the wizard of Web retailing has managed to lose $3 billion. That works out to an astounding 17.1% loss on each dollar of sales.
(Note to venture capitalists: You stake us for the next decade and let us lose $3 billion and we’ll build you a brand even Donald Trump might envy.)
A retailing wizard? When you look at the numbers, Amazon.com looks more like Kmart than Wal-Mart. As a matter of fact, in the last decade, Kmart managed to lose only 1.8% on each dollar of sales and Kmart went bankrupt.

New from Google: automatic suggestions
(December 10 2004) Google is testing a new feature called Google Suggest. An equally suitable name would probably be Google Guess, as Google tries to guess what you are trying to find in real time.
As soon as you have started typing Google will try to guess what you are looking for, offering you alternative search keywords and queries with an estimate of the number of pages containing the relevant search keyword phrases.
Google Suggest can also be used as a tool for generating alternative search queries for search engine optimization.
Google Suggest FAQ