[thelist] One blowhard, hundreds of cubic feet of hot air

[Judah McAuley]

At 03:05 PM 1/22/2002 -0500, Brian King expounded...
><snip>
>M. Burns stated, a number of times mind you, that Amazon had a good business
>model, and had the profits to substantiate it.  I argued at the time, that
>Amazon had never posted a profit and wasn't forecasting to do so in a while.
>that they M. Burns stated had earned a profit, in his best factual tone that
>he could muster and continued to build his case using that (bogus)
>information.

</snip>

Note in the following:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/052800.htm
Quote:
  "A year ago, Amazon executives said the company would aim to turn a pro 
forma operating profit, which excludes many expenses, by the end of 2001."

Amazon has been very forthright about its earnings for quite some 
time.  When the market told them to get big at the expense of profits, they 
did that.  When the market told them to make a profit at the expense of 
market share, they said "OK".  And they did it.  They forecasted a year in 
advance that they would achieve pro-forma profitability in the fourth 
quarter.  They not only achieved that, but they actually made a net profit 
as well.

Note also in this article:

  Analysts said the results indicate that Jeff Bezos -- the company founder 
who was named Time's Person of the Year amid the dot-com boom of 1999 -- 
was right when he pushed the company to ``get big fast'' at the expense of 
immediate profits in the late 1990s.

``E-commerce isn't an easy matter,'' said Jeetil Patel, an analyst with 
Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown. ``It took the company $1.2 billion in revenue to 
achieve a profit, so scale is definitely a critical success factor. Not a 
lot of smaller companies will be able to pull this off.''

I believe that Martin was quite right in his analysis.  I also belive that 
you dissented in a quite rude manner.  Rudeness rarely bolsters your point 
amongst people with a brain.

--Judah McAuley