Once again the rumblings out of Silicon Valley are yet more proof that Wall Street's frustration with Amazon.com is growing, and has, in fact, broken out into open insolence. Two years of declining profits have left analysts wondering just when Amazon.com's technology magic is going to pay off. "It seems like Amazon is a company which will perpetually be in investment mode," observed Piper Jaffray's, Safa Rashtchy recently. Worse, analysts are even questioning the fundamental proposition of internet retail, with Prudential's Mark Rowen asking - "Why is it that we are not seeing efficiency if, in fact, the model is more efficient?" Well, all I can say is that I’ve been writing about this for years. With the exception of eBay, no one has made much of an impression with the online retailing model! Each year Amazon's profits diminish - and they've been shrinking as the economy has picked up. And each years Jeff “Man of the Year” Bezos offers the excuse that it needs to invest more in technology. Amazon wants to make search technology horizontal - licensing its own search engine - and this week offered itself up as a storage retailer. Its offering excess capacity on its own servers to all comers as a web service, called S3, for 15 cents a gigabyte. That's about as far from selling Harry Potter as you can imagine. So is it a technology platform, or an online shop? Still, now that Jeff has decided to concentrate on space exploration we can look forward to his promises of creating an ever expanding Martian customer base!
I hear Amazon offers free shipping. Does that include planet Zargon?
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