Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as possible. I have a personal goal of reaching one million readers. I can achieve it with your help.

  the Software View: Amazon.com, a river runs through it (Part I)

Welcome back, gentle readers. The Amazon River runs miles wide and deep and drains a continent. My newsletter is the same. All in an effort to bring you excellent content!

For those of you with Web access and a Netscape Navigator browser, please click here:
http://www.softwareview.com/
Scroll down the page and you will notice a link entitled, "Daily view weblog". The daily news page is also known as a "web log". It is en vogue and the fashion of these days to call it that. Click on the link, click "reload" on your browser or clear your browser cache to ensure that you always receive the freshest, hottest daily news concerning Java^TM, Linux®, XML, and the software industry! The link never changes, but I will be updating the HTML file page behind it every day. Please, do take a gander at it every day.

Also, gentle readers, the Software View is an Associate Internet World Wide Web site of Amazon.com. I'd like to extend my sincere, heartfelt gratitude and thanks for your patronage. I'm offering links to books, et cetera that you can purchase from my web site. I'd greatly appreciate it if you would purchase software industry books from my web site. Help support my newsletter and web site by purchasing items from Amazon.com from my web site. Here is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
Click here

Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

Here's a funny cartoon about today's consumer e-volution:
Click here

Gentle Readers, quick, would you like to know what are some of the hottest-selling items on the Internet and the World Wide Web today? Here are some hints: they are quaint, old-fashioned, and quite low tech. Surprisingly, some of the hottest-selling items on the Internet today are ... books, of all things. The book business is unforgiving. Growth is slow; profit margins are thin; and the product being sold is a commodity, neither better nor worse, no matter who is selling it. Since the year of 1995, the number of adult trade books sold in the United States has increased by less than one percent, according to the Book Industry Study Group. In the year of 1998, the number actually dropped - by three percent. Book selling is not a hot growth business. In books, Jeffrey Preston Bezos (pronounced BAY-zoes), who possesses no previous experience in retail merchandising, chose a clear winner: a market that had no big on-line rivals and no dominant traditional players - even number one Barnes & Noble has only about eleven percent of the United States market. It is supreme irony that the quite dusty, old-world, pedestrian business of selling books is an important electronic commerce market of the future. Amazon.com was first to the market selling books on-line. Amazon.com is amazing.com! Amazon.com, a river runs through it.

Amazon.com, Incorporated was founded in the year of 1994 in Seattle, Washington. Noteworthy members of its Board of Directors include Scott D. Cook, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Intuit, Incorporated and John Doerr, General Partner at the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Silicon Valley venture capital investment firm. As of the month of February of the year 1999, they had more than 1,600 employees, had more than 50.2 million shares outstanding, and possessed a Wall Street stock market capitalization and valuation of $25 billion (a level that took Wal-Mart twenty-seven years to reach). Analysts were flabbergasted when Amazon.com registered per year sales revenues of approximately $607 million. The company is on track for more than $1 billion in annual sales revenue this year.

You may be thinking to yourself: these Internet stocks are ridiculously high, they can not go higher. But they do! ... I can not connect reality to what I see in the stock valuations. Trying to get your arms around the value of an Internet stock is like trying to hug the air. By time-tested valuation methods, such as price-to-earnings or price-to-sales ratios, they trade at ethereal levels, leading most denizens of Wall Street to knock them, only to see them go higher and higher still. Are we missing something? And to answer that, analysts and portfolio managers are coming up with new ways of valuing Internet stocks. They are serious attempts to get a handle on the value of companies operating in an industry that is revolutionizing the economy. Shaun Andrikopoulos, who follows Internet stocks for investment banker BT Alex. Brown Incorporated, came up with Theoretical Earnings Multiple Analysis, or TEMA. By that measure, which projects future earnings by estimating revenue growth and the operating margins that the company would hope to achieve when it has matured, Andrikopoulos says price-to-earnings ratios can be lowered. The analyst says that his model gives a "feel for the realistic theoretical earnings power of an Amazon.com." Internet stocks move so fast these days that the recommendations become stale in no time. On October 29, 1998, analyst Steven Horen of NationsBanc Montgomery Securities Incorporated recommended Amazon.com Incorporated at $117, about eight and a half times 1999 sales revenues, and set a target stock price of $150 in twelve months. The stock hit $150 in three weeks. Horen still rates Amazon.com a buy, as do fourteen other analysts. "I am not in the business of changing my recommendations every three days," he says. Some followers of the Internet stocks, such as Steve Harmon, the senior investment analyst at Internet.com, also look at figures such as the number of individuals who visit an Internet web site. That data is reported by Media Metrix, Incorporated, a Web research firm. Also, another qualifier is the type of visitor to the web site. An Amazon.com visitor is worth more than, say a Lycos visitor, because Amazon.com visitors are assumed to already have their wallets and purses open, ready to make electronic purchases. The Internet is the most sweeping and powerful medium to come along since television. There is no question that enormous growth is possible in that space.

Jeanne Lee writes, "How does one explain this Internet stock frenzy? There are methods behind the price madness. They are just a bit different. They are trying to value companies without any historical valuation rules or tools. In mid-December of the year 1998, Henry Blodget, an Internet stock market analyst at CIBC Oppenheimer, raised his Amazon.com price target from $150 (which the stock had already passed) to $400. A month later, Blodget was looking pretty good, as Amazon.com blasted right past the $400 level. Start by looking at the size of Amazon.com's entire target market. World-wide, the market for books, music, and videos is around $126 billion. So how big a slice of that can the company get? Draw an analogy between Amazon.com, the leader in its category, and Wal-Mart, the leader in discount retailing, which has a ten percent market share. Since Amazon.com is adding to its product mix, it is fair to estimate that it could hit a ten percent market share in the next five years, which would amount to $15 billion in sales revenues per year. What could the company's profit margins be? Traditional retailers typically achieve net profit margins of one percent to four percent. But Amazon.com will be able to run leaner than bricks-and-mortar super stores by paying less rent, keeping less inventory, and hiring fewer employees. Its net profit margins could be more like Dell's - a fatter seven percent. So, seven percent of $15 billion is more than $1 billion in net income. What price-to-earnings multiple will the stock market assign Amazon.com at that point? Price-to-earnings multiples normally range to about seventy-five or so for a company that is growing quickly. Amazon.com could be worth more than $53 billion. With that in mind, Amazon.com's current $25 billion stock market capitalization and valuation is plausible."

Amazon.com's boy billionaire was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has a brother named Mark and a sister named Christine. His father, named Miguel, left Cuba as a refugee in the early 1960's and currently works today as an executive at Exxon Corporation. His mother, Jacklyn, worked in a bank. Chip Bayers writes, "Family is important to him. The Bezos family is extremely close; they actually enjoy spending the holidays together. Reflecting upon the source of 35-years-old computer wizard Bezos's drive, his closest friends turn inevitably to the legion of family stories, all of which seem to revolve around the theme of hard work and equally hard play. But within the well-known Bezos family story lies a remarkable story of collective strength. When he was three, he got frustrated sleeping in a crib. His mom did not think he was ready for a real bed, but Bezos was having none of that. Soon after, she found her son - screwdriver clutched in his tiny hand - trying to dismantle the crib to make it more like a real bed. She sighs: "I knew I had met my match." Bezos still gives fits to his elders - the likes of Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart. With a genial manner, he seems an unlikely electronic commerce mogul. Yet, he has made almost no visible mis-steps since he conceived the idea of Amazon.com Incorporated in early 1994.

Bezos displayed an unusual intensity and drive early on. He got so engrossed in activities at Montessori pre-school that teachers had to pick him up in his chair to move him on to new tasks. Jacklyn's challenge as a parent was to stay a step ahead of, or at least next to, her prodigy. "I think single-handedly, we kept many Radio Shacks in business," she jokes. During his late grade-school years, Bezos became fixated on a device known as the Infinity Cube, which uses a set of motorized mirrors to allow one to stare into "infinity." But at a purchase price of twenty dollars, it was too expensive to buy, she told him. Bezos figured out that the pieces of the cube could be bought cheaply, so he did - and built it himself. "The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the Button," he said at the time. "You have to be able to think ... for yourself." The story of Bezos and the Infinity Cube is documented in Turning on Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas. Written by Julie Ray and published locally in the Houston, Texas area in the year of 1977 - the book follows twelve-years-old Bezos through a typical day in the Vanguard program at Houston, Texas's River Oaks Elementary School, a magnet school that was part of a voluntary integration effort in the city's public school system. Bezos endured a forty-miles round-trip commute each day to attend. The author describes him as "friendly but serious," even "courtly," and possessed of "general intellectual excellence."

His parents enrolled him into the high-pressure world of Texas youth football. Within two weeks, the coach had named him defensive captain, because Bezos was one of the few kids on the team who could remember all of the plays - not only where he was supposed to be but also the assignments for the other ten players on his squad. He completed his personal immersion in the shared world of every American geek growing up in the 1970's and early 1980's by diving into the deep end of the science-fiction and fantasy pool. When the River Oaks school gained access to a mainframe computer in downtown Houston via a time-share system, he and his friends spent hours on it playing a primitive Star Trek game, searching for cloaked Klingon ships in a three-by-three matrix.

Bezos spent summers on a family farm in Cotulla, Texas, developing a love for science from his grandfather, a retired manager for the Atomic Energy Commission. By the time he was fourteen, he wanted to become either an astronaut or a physicist. The family garage was always filled with his projects, from Heath kits, the scattered components of a robot, an ancient Hoover vacuum on its way to becoming a primitive hovercraft, to an open umbrella spine clad in aluminum foil, soon to become a solar cooking experiment. Achieving his goals meant succeeding at school, and Bezos would show as a teenager that behind that easy-going facade and booming laugh was a relentless, even intimidating, work ethic, one that has become his hallmark at Amazon.com. "He was always a formidable presence," says Joshua Weinstein. When Bezos made it clear that it was his intention to become class valedictorian, for example, Weinstein says everybody else understood they were working for second place. Besides securing the valedictorian's title, Bezos was also one of three members of his graduating class awarded a Silver Knight Award, a prestigious academic honor in south Florida high schools, sponsored by Knight Ridder's Miami Herald newspaper.

During his second high school summer, Bezos embarked on his first serious entrepreneurial effort: a summer-education camp for fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders that he labeled the DREAM Institute. (DREAM stood for Directed REAsoning Methods.) Six students signed up for the $600 camp; two of them were Bezos's own brother and sister. He even charged his own brother and sister to attend. The program, prophetically, emphasized a mix of science and literature, the future and the past. Required reading included The Once and Future King, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Watership Down, Black Beauty, Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, and David Copperfield, along with the Broadway plays Our Town and The Matchmaker. The science curriculum ranged from fossil fuels and fission to space colonies and interstellar travel - with a dollop of television and advertising study thrown in for good measure. "Our program," the budding entrepreneurs wrote in a "Dear parent" flyer generated on Bezos's Apple II and a dot-matrix printer, "emphasizes the use of new ways of thinking in old areas." He was Miami's Palmetto High School's class valedictorian and its president.

At Princeton University, Bezos quickly veered to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business. "I have always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize," he says. He achieved a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science. During his senior year, Bezos turned down job offers from Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting to join a start-up company called Fitel, which had run a full-page advertisement in The Daily Princetonian soliciting the school's "best computer science graduates." Bezos was employee number eleven. His success and skill at debugging spaghetti computer code earned him rapid promotion to head of development and director of customer service, which entailed a weekly commute between New York City and London, where his divisions were located. After nearly two years, he headed for a job as a product manager at Bankers Trust. There, he sold software tools to the company's pension-fund clients, but he also explored outside projects. By the year of 1990, after two years at Bankers Trust, Bezos was circulating his resume to headhunters with the express goal of escaping financial services for a technology company, where he could pursue what he had decided upon was his "real passion," using computers and so-called second-wave automation to revolutionize business.

Then a headhunter called, telling Bezos, "I know you said you would kill me if I even proposed the finance thing, but there is this special opportunity that is actually a very unusual financial company." It was the two-and-a-half-years-old Wall Street hedge fund company, D. E. Shaw. David Shaw and Bezos clicked together immediately. Shaw thought that his 26-years-old hire was "fantastic," and a "pleasurable person to talk with" who was "also very entrepreneurial." Four years later, Bezos had worked his way up to a hedge-fund manager, computer systems developer, and youngest-ever senior vice-president, one of only four at the company. During the year of 1994, Shaw put Bezos in charge of exploring new ideas to invest in and business opportunities in the burgeoning world of the Internet. It was while brainstorming ideas in the then-unfamiliar area of electronic commerce that Bezos happened upon his deceptively simple conclusion: The most logical product to sell over the Internet and World Wide Web was books, largely because two of the country's largest book distributors already had exhaustive electronic lists.

As Amazon.com has long since established, no single physical book store, not even a super store, can carry a comprehensive inventory of all the current books published and in print. The distributors, carrying thousands of titles, in effect, act as the warehouse for most stores, particularly smaller independent book-sellers. When customers ask a store clerk for a book they do not have, the first place many of them will turn to fill the customer's order is Ingram Book Group or Baker & Taylor, the two largest distributors in the country. These companies' inventory lists, once regularly circulated to book stores in packs of micro-fiche, went digital in the late 1980's along with others in the book trade - an unheralded benchmark that would enable Bezos to offer books on-line through the virtual retailer he envisioned creating.

But David Shaw and others at the company were not ready to make selling books a priority. Bezos approached Shaw to tell him he had been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and wanted to leave. After surfing the Internet for the first time, he happened upon a Web site that said the Internet population was growing at 2,300 percent per year - and the light bulb went on. Bezos says that he kept staring at the World Wide Web's 2,300 percent annual growth figure and placing his thoughts within what he calls a "regret-minimization framework." "When I am eighty years old," he asked himself, "am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing a chance to be there at the beginning of the Internet? Yes." "Let us take a walk," he recalls Shaw saying, and the two of them set off for Central Park. Shaw tried to impress upon Bezos what he would be giving up by leaving; not just financial security but a pivotal role at D. E. Shaw. "I did tell him that we might be competing with him, too," Shaw says. Bezos was willing to accept that risk. Within weeks, Bezos passed up a fat bonus and abruptly left that cushy job in the year of 1994 to hit the road and race across the country.

He settled upon Seattle for it being a technology hub, its technical talent, and its proximity to Ingram Book Group's Oregon warehouse, one of its distribution facilities, which allowed for quicker turn-around on deliveries from that key supplier. And Washington had a relatively small population, which limited the pool of potential customers from whom Amazon.com would be forced to collect sales tax. (It is no accident that the company's second warehouse is located in Delaware, which not only has no sales tax, but is also an ideal base for serving East Coast customers; its third warehouse is near Reno, Nevada - which lets Amazon.com originate deliveries close to the huge California population, but just outside that state's tax-collection borders.)

MacKenzie, his wife and a novelist, and Bezos made their now famous cross-country road trip to the Seattle area. While she drove, Bezos pecked out his business plan on his lap-top computer and called prospective investors along the way. He had already spent months laying the groundwork for Amazon.com, beginning with his World Wide Web investigations at D. E. Shaw. Bezos had also made at least one recruiting trip to California to meet with three programmers. Over breakfast in Santa Cruz, Bezos managed to convince one of them, Shel Kaphan, to become employee number one. Kaphan has a reputation among the engineering staff at Amazon.com as the prototypical pessimist. He came by his doom-saying honestly - he had worked for at least a dozen companies before Amazon.com, including failed start-ups and bureaucratically inept monsters. Shortly before he and Bezos met, he had left Kaleida Labs, an ill-fated Apple spin-off, which makes it all the more remarkable that he almost immediately found Bezos trustworthy - so trustworthy, in fact, that Kaphan agreed in short order to relocate to Seattle. Bezos returned in principle to the setting of his childhood experiments, building the prototype for Amazon.com with Kaphan and a contractor named Paul Barton-Davis in the cramped, poorly insulated converted garage of a rented home in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington. A pot-bellied stove commanded the middle of the room, and extension cords ran everywhere because there were not enough electrical outlets to power the trio's Sun SPARCstations. Eventually the stove was ejected in a space-saving flurry and replaced by a set of ceramic space heaters, which further taxed the over-burdened power supply.

In their quest to revolutionize retailing, the three of them made ample use of the unsuspecting competition's physical resources. One can never tire of the delicious irony that Kaphan and Bezos would frequently repair to the Barnes & Noble super store in downtown Bellevue to drink coffee and toss around ideas in the relative calm of the in-store cafe. The super store also served as a venue for business meetings with outsiders, suppliers, and prospective employees. MacKenzie even negotiated the company's first freight contracts there. At one point, a single venture capital firm in the Seattle area wanted to dominate the entire early round of investment, but demanded a fifty percent discount on the valuation Bezos had offered. He refused and the venture capitalists passed, in part because they believed Barnes & Noble would crush Amazon.com as soon as it turned its attention in Bezos's direction. Watching that decision, Tom Alberg, Amazon.com's first board member, says, taught him that "you need to do due diligence in this world, but at some point, you need to make a judgment about the people." Quietly launching the Internet web site on-line in the month of July of the year 1995, Bezos quickly set out to make the customer's experience as appealing as sipping a latte in a book-store cafe. Bezos and Kaphan rigged the SPARCstations to sound a bell's ring every time the servers recorded a sales purchase. The bells started ringing - so often that within a few weeks the cacophony had become unbearable and they disabled it.

It was not that Bezos was the first out of the box or the gate with an idea for World Wide Web shopping, or that he had happened upon some magical elixir unknown to other would-be merchants. But he had made a series of pragmatic, small, and smart choices that eventually added up to being able to achieve huge and stupendous dreams. What he understood before most people was that the ability of the Internet to connect almost anybody with almost any product meant that he could do things that could not be done in the physical world - such as sell over 4.7 million titles (books, compact discs, videos, DVD's, games) in a single on-line store. It starts with the realization that, in fact, not everything should be virtual - that Amazon.com should own its own warehouses, so that the company can maintain quality control over the packaging and shipping of orders, which Bezos sees as an essential opportunity to enhance the Amazon.com customer experience. This enables the company to combine orders for book titles from multiple publishers - or orders that include a book, a compact disc, and a video - into single packages. It also gives Amazon.com employees, who package the orders, a chance to check for defective goods. In its music department, for example, the company will replace cracked or broken compact disc jewel storage cases. Here is another aspect of Amazon.com owning its own warehouses. Getting purchases into customers' hands as quickly as possible is a key part of the Amazon.com experience.

The title of the first book ever sold at Amazon.com is Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter. Bezos is an avid reader who likes non-fiction and fiction, particularly science-fiction stories. His favorite book is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Bezos is slightly built and stands at a height of five feet and eight inches tall. His most distinguishing characteristic is that he possesses Seattle's loudest laugh. He has got an easy, raucous laugh that other people have described as a hee-haw. It is something that dis-arms just about everybody - Bezos's explosive laugh. When he yuks it up in his office, they say he can be heard down the hall, upstairs and downstairs, too. But then, with his Amazon.com stock worth north of $9.1 billion, he has a lot to laugh about. That laugh, which frequently interrupts conversations, comes out as a long, extended bray, startling the uninitiated. The laugh has become famous, too, yet it only underscores Bezos's ardor. The vision thing is not all that he has brought to Amazon.com. His energy level permeates the room. His energy - he runs up and down the company's three flights of stairs - provides much of the place's electricity. Bezos has a full-steam-ahead, leaning-into-the-wind style of walking when he is in a hurry. Whenever there is a game of hockey-like broom ball, he is the first to tear off his shirt, wrap it around his head, and let out a rebel yell. His well-lived-in office sports dry cleaning hanging in the corner and a half-eaten sandwich upon the desk. His hobbies are Amazon.com, family, Amazon.com, hiking, and Amazon.com. During the year of 1998, he read thirty-five books. The title of the top-selling book at Amazon.com for 1996 is Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design by author David Siegel.

Wall Street believes that the Internet and the World Wide Web are the promised land. During February of the year 1999, Amazon.com's stock was trading at about $350 per share, 32 times current sales revenues, 35 times its May 11, 1997 initial public offering (IPO) starting price of $9 per share, post-split. On its first day of trading, it went up 4 and 3/4 points. That is a market capitalization and share value of - hold on to your seat - $25 billion, or five times higher than Barnes & Noble's. That value is more than the combined gross national products of Luxembourg and Iceland put together. All for a company that is losing more millions every year and is not expected to turn a profit until at least 2001. This means that investors and Wall Street valued Amazon.com at a higher market capitalization than they valued these well-known companies and other titans of industry. Amazon.com is worth a value exceeding that of: Sears Roebuck, Mattel, Federated Department Stores, Delta Air Lines, Hershey Foods, the combined value of Kmart and J. C. Penney's put together, Hilton Hotels, Toys 'R' Us, Maytag, Apple Computer, Circuit City, the combined value of Barnes & Noble and the Borders Group together, health-care giant Humana, cosmetics queen Estee Lauder, truck-rental giant Ryder System, Dow Jones Incorporated, or Knight-Ridder Incorporated. This is an unprecedented amount of economic value created during the two short years of Amazon.com's public existence.

Call these investors nuts, but their underlying assumption is dead-on: The potential for electronic commerce, and Amazon.com in particular, is as vast as cyberspace. More people keep swarming on-line - swelling to some 320 million by 2002, predicts market researcher International Data Corporation. A new Visa USA Incorporated survey of some 1,000 Internet users found that nearly half plan to shop on the Internet this fall alone. All told, cybershoppers are expected to spend $108 billion by 2003, says Forrester Research Incorporated. Analysts think Amazon.com ultimately will fulfill investors' seemingly out-sized expectations.

Amazon.com has done everything it can so far to justify the faith that Wall Street and investors have shown. It is the first mover in a sector where being first has come to define leadership. "They have scared the daylights out of Barnes & Noble and Borders," said Erica Rugullies, a senior electronic commerce analyst at Giga Information Group. "That indicates the type of threat they are in the industry." Amazon.com also has consistently beaten analysts' estimates for sales revenue per year.

Mark Gimein writes, "Amazon.com, Incorporated Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bezos aims to turn the on-line book seller into a dominant international electronic commerce Internet and World Wide Web site - and the future of shopping on the Internet, or even retailing itself, may be at stake. He is a daring entrepreneur. His company aspires to become the Wal-Mart of cyberspace and they are moving to rule Internet shopping. Bezos is redefining retailing as fundamentally as Sam Walton did when he opened his first Wal-Mart store in Rodgers, Arkansas in 1962. Indeed, Amazon.com is blazing a trail in the world of commerce where no merchant has gone before. By pioneering - and damn near perfecting - the art of selling on-line, Amazon.com is redefining retailing and forcing the titans of retail to scramble onto the Internet. More than that, it is jolting them into re-thinking whether their traditional advantages - physical size, mass-media branding, and even the sensory appeal of shopping in stores - will be enough to thrive in the new networked-enterprise economy. Says Duke University marketing professor Martha Rogers: "Amazon.com is an example of how an upstart can redefine its whole industry." Bezos's competitors have missed that, in focusing on the consumer in a way few Internet web entrepreneurs can match, he is actually trying to transform the world. "Jeff always wanted to make a lot of money," says his high school girlfriend. She remains awed by Bezos's commitment. "It was not about the money itself. It was about what he was going to do with the money, about changing the future." Certainly, his backers and supporters insist, Amazon.com's founder has the necessary talents. Board member Stonesifer says, "People are drawn to him because he seems unbelievably like a winner. And they want to help him win."

Not since super stores and mail-order catalogers came along in the 1980's have merchants faced such a wrenching shift to a new way of doing business. It is a lot like what Wal-Mart did in the past decade: It used computers to transform the entire process of getting products to customers, all the way from the warehouse to Wal-Mart's welcome mats. Now Bezos is using Internet technologies to shatter the perennial retail trade-off - he can offer a rich selection and personalized service, while still reaching millions of customers. This is known as mass-customization. Its vast and growing database of customer interests is a cross-marketer's dream. That has earth-bound retailers worried.

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

Join my free e-mail newsletter called the Software View by clicking here or by sending an e-mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org

Sun, Java, and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. the Software View is independent of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds