Can Amazon Catch Apple?

摘要

It's ok to feel sorry for internet CEOs these days. In the past month, investors with lofty expectations have punished the stocks of such companies as Yahoo, eBay and Google. But no one seems to be having a harder time than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose famous goal was to sell everything from books to 200-pound treadmills over the Net. Even though Amazon just cleared a record $1 billion in quarterly sales, Wall Street is now more interested in the only e-commerce feature Bezos doesn't have— the delivery of music and movies digitally, a la Apple's wildly successful iTunes. "Amazon is especially well positioned to capture a bigger part of that business," Bezos told analysts last week—before his company's stock plunged 10 percent the day after it announced lower-than-expect-ed profits. "But it's premature to talk in any detail about those initiatives."