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conflux

MSNBC Home is where the heart is for Bezos
"Amazon.com is in this jam because so far it hasn�t been able to make any money. Yet, in violation of what might properly be termed the First Rule of Holes (when you�re in one, stop digging), the company keeps pushing ahead with a business plan in which the more you sell, the more you lose"

"At some point, it all gets old and too familiar. Been there, done that, heard it all before. For more than half a decade now, Wall Street�s sell-side analysts have been talking up the Internet investment story to a willing audience of eager investors who thought that stocks went only one way: Up! Now those same investors are passing the same sell-side analysts on the way back down, and fewer of them are likely to be seduced a second time by the oldest pitch Wall Street has going: Give me your money today, and I�ll make you rich tomorrow."

redux [02.01.00]
News.com Stellar IPO prices fall despite e-commerce boom
"James Schrager, a professor at the University of Chicago's business school, is among the most blunt at summarizing the e-tailers' outlook. "Amazon's model doesn't work, the same with most e-commerce companies," Schrager said. "Amazon has discovered that the more they sell, the more they lose. All the numbers are going backwards."�

News.com Amazon snags patent for recommendation service
"Amazon has added another patent to its collection, this time for an early version of its recommendation service.

The new patent could spell trouble for dozens of e-commerce sites that use similar technology to recommend books, videos or other products to customers, patent experts say.�

redux [03.11.00]
The New York Times Magazine Patently Absurd
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: "The patented One Click� feature," Bezos calls it."

"In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago, the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it nourish."

redux [04.15.00]
Civilization Magazine Branded Knowledge: Copyrights and Wrongs
"Today our telephone lines and cable lines are getting longer and fatter and are crying to be filled up with news and movies and songs--this is what made Time Warner's content so irresistible to America Online. Felix Rohatyn, the former investment banker and current U.S. Ambassador to France, recently declared that "intellectual property ... is what the 21st century is going to be all about." By 1997, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, copyright industries contributed some $350 billion to America's gross domestic product; since then, moreover, companies with a capital base of copyrighted material have grown roughly twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy.

In the new information economy, intellectual property has a crucial economic advantage. While its research and development costs--the months a film crew spends on location, the years of testing a software design-- are steep, the marginal costs of each videotape or software download are relatively small. Once enough units are sold to cover initial costs, the price delivers almost pure profit. Hence the logic of continually reaching new markets--in a word, globalization."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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