/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.55034598]

Dear boomers, how obvious was it during the dot com bubble that Amazon was going to be massive? Was it easy to tell during that time or was it all just a gamble?

[Anonymous No.55034605]

>>55034598
>Was it easy to tell during that time or was it all just a gamble?
it was a gamble. amazon was just one of the many tech stocks out there. even the name was cringe

[Anonymous No.55034620]

>>55034598
It was easy to tell, from the first time I used Amazon, when I received my package my first thoughts were "this is the future".

[Anonymous No.55034636]

>>55034605

Even ripple sounds cringe.

[Anonymous No.55034640]

>>55034598
https://sundayspecial.substack.com/p/why-barrons-thought-amazon-would

[Anonymous No.55034663]

>>55034620
Well..did you learn how to draw manga?

[Anonymous No.55034672]

>>55034620
my parents offered me this book as a kid thanks for the memories

[Anonymous No.55034674]

>>55034663
yeah I did.

[Anonymous No.55034689]

>>55034620
How did Amazon differentiate itself from its competitors at the time? How much Amazon stock did you buy?

[Anonymous No.55034690]

>>55034674
Draw me an uguu kawaii face now or I'm taking you to kleros court

[Anonymous No.55034732]

>>55034672
still have it too

>>55034689
>How did Amazon differentiate itself from its competitors at the time?
All I knew is that I actually used Amazon and it worked well, that's how I knew it would succeed. Unfortunately I wasn't able to invest, primarily because I was a broke college student, but for other reasons beyond my control as well. If I were in the position where I could have invested I would have.

[Anonymous No.55034750]

>>55034690
maybe later, kek

[Anonymous No.55036404]

>>55034598
Massive fucking gamble. They weren't that impressive, barely out of books. Webvan.com was a better bet at the time. And even if you bought Amazon in 1999, it would have taken you YEARS to break even. Only 2 people held Amazon that long...Bezos...and his parents.

To me, Amazon and the Dutch Tulip mania are the 2 critical foci for speculative markets like crypto. Even if you see the future 100% correct, you can still lose.

[Anonymous No.55036423]

>>55034598
Amazon operated at a loss for a decade before becoming profitable. It was a massive gamble.

[Anonymous No.55036443]

>>55036404
oh yeah- I'm not holding fucking Cardano until 2035

[Anonymous No.55036447]

>>55034598
It was not easy to tell. I remember doing the math in 1999, reckoning that Amazon would have to take over the whole book market for the stock's valuation to be justified, which I considered a reductio ad absurdum. Little could I imagine that Amazon would take over a lot more than the book market.

[Anonymous No.55036457]

>>55034620
2002 was well after the dotcom bubble, noob.

[Anonymous No.55036462]

Will Amazon ever be displaced by something?

[Anonymous No.55036481]

>>55036457
okay, so by 2002 was it obvious to you that Amazon would be massive? Still was to me, and why would anyone have wanted to buy Amazon during the dotcom bubble anyway?

[Anonymous No.55036506]

>>55036481
AMZN stock was 90% cheaper in 2002. Much more reasonable price for an online bookstore.

[Anonymous No.55036514]

>>55034598
Back then we had several websites for shopping, several music, video sharing, and so on. They all looked somewhat equally powerfull, and some people used one over another but most people were just kinda using them all. It was imposible to know which one had legs.

to put things into perspective, lets say right now you can browse reddit, 4chan, snapchat, twitter, facebook and you can use them depending on what you are discussing, now Imagine if in the future 99% of all people simply starts using reddit. today, it is imposible to predict. Thats what happened to amazon

[Anonymous No.55036519]

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj8CthSn2tI

LENO: Here's the thing I don't understand. The company is worth billions...
BEZOS: Yes.
LENO: And every time I pick up the paper, each year it loses more money that it lost the year before
BEZOS: (laughs)
LENO: Company's never made a profit
BEZOS: That's right
(crowd laughs)
LENO: Now why... how does it.... why... how does that work?
BEZOS: Seems like a new math, doesn't it?
LENO: It does, I mean it... to someone who doesn't know anything about this stuff, it's amazing, you know? We lost $12 billion last year, and we're doing great!
BEZOS: (laughs) There are a whole series of Doonesbury cartoons about this, this is not a new phenomenon. We are a famously unprofitable company, and we're investing in the future. Which is not unusual, companies have done this before, what's a little surprising about amazon.com is the scale at which we're doing it, we're doing it in a big way.
LENO: I see, so you just keep reinvesting.
BEZOS: We're reinvesting.

We are a famously unprofitable company
We are a famously unprofitable company
We are a famously unprofitable company
We are a famously unprofitable company

[Anonymous No.55036543]

>>55036519
reminds me of twitter and uber, millions of users.... losing money since inception, classic zombie companies, i dont think elon can make twitter profitable, but lets see.

[Anonymous No.55036554]

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87393&page=1

[Anonymous No.55036577]

>>55036481
>why would anyone have wanted to buy Amazon during the dotcom bubble anyway?

The same reason anybody wanted to buy ANY crypto in 2021, during a mania / bubble you cant correctly price an asset, everything is inflated and overpriced (but it looks and feel underpriced), and you think its a new paradigm and the asset can keep running because the market has not priced in what it does. You should read about the plateu of productivity to understand the hype cycle every new shiny thing gets. currently we are in the early phase of the AI bubble. We dont know how its going to affect or change our surroundings, but many stocks are already overpriced based on something that has not delivered what the market is pricing in.

[Anonymous No.55036613]

>>55036506
in 2002 they were selling much more than books. Even during the bubble they were selling more than books. When did you first use Amazon? I can't see how someone could have used Amazon back in those days and not felt like it was something special. Amazon was an obvious winner because I actually used it, there aren't many things people actually use that solve a problem and doesn't end up succeeding. I remember back watching a Futurama episode and they had a line where the Jamaican guy calls someone a "risk taker" for investing in Amazon, never made sense to me, Amazon had real users and real growth, granted I never would have expected to become as huge as it has expanding into other things but I knew it was going to be huge. It's like using the ChatGPT for the first time and then you keep using it, that's how you know it's going to succeed.

[Anonymous No.55036634]

Not obvious at all.
Speaking about dot com, I had coffee with this guy for years. He was bitching about how dumb our company was about internet, and it was (MSFT my friends). One day he quit. A few years later he was a billionaire. Also it is likely that his company started the crash. He pulled out beforehand though. Last time I saw him he wouldnt get within sight of the windows of his new skyscraper, afraid of getting sniped, for real.

I never ever would have guessed he would succeed, he had a rough personality and didn't communicate especially well.

[Anonymous No.55036638]

>>55036577
see the difference is I actually used Amazon, did you? It's because I used it and continued to use it that I knew how good they were, and 20+ years later I'm still using it and can't even find a single complaint to make about them during that entire period, their customer service and platform always worked well from the first day I used it and that's why they've succeeded.

[Anonymous No.55036642]

>>55034598
As a millennial, I remember Amazon being a bookstore during my college years

[Anonymous No.55036658]

>>55036613
I started using Amazon in 1996. I bought tons of books there. The main advantage was their deeply discounted prices and exemption from taxes. I first ordered music CDs from them in 1999. My first order of "general merchandise" was in 2001 (some kitchen stuff). Most of my online shopping for non-media products was done through other sites until Amazon eventually came to dominate 90% of online commerce many years later.

[Anonymous No.55036687]

>>55036658
>Most of my online shopping for non-media products was done through other sites
curious, who else were you using to shop for stuff online? for me Amazon was the go to, and always has been. Other big name stores took years to get their online shit together.

[Anonymous No.55036730]

>>55036687
Too many to list. Small niche sites for specific items. 99% of them are now sold through Amazon marketplace.

[Anonymous No.55036784]

>>55034620
New egg was better for most things, but Amazon was the book dtore.

[Anonymous No.55036788]

Amazon was already pretty massive before the stock really took off. It just literally took more than a decade before they turned a profit, because Bezos was far more concerned about pumping everything they made into offering new products and services and growing market share than making shareholders rich. Then eventually Amazon started actually turning profits and seriously printing money. Now investors flock to all these tech companies that just burn VC cash and aren't even profitable in the hopes that they're going to be the next Amazon.

[bodhi No.55037303]

>>55034598
It was a big gamble, the dot com craze had everything making a website but books especially, there were already bookstores everywhere, was a product no one needed really because you have to realize when it started it didnt have everything it has now, it was just books and you couldnt even get any book you wanted, just books they had in stock. I bought a couple college books when I was in uni my junior or senior year in 2003 or so was my first purchase from them

[Anonymous No.55037323]

>>55034620
I got some good stuff