Happy e-birthdays

摘要

July 16th was a big day in Amazon's his-tory. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", the sixth in the series on schoolboy wizardry, was released with all-time record advance orders from the online store of 1.5m. On the same day, Amazon broadcast a live concert on its website to mark the day in 1995 when it "first opened its virtual doors for business". E-commerce is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. On the last weekend in June, online auctioneer eBay held a gala anniversary dinner in its home town of San Jose. Yahoo!, a portal site, can also claim this year as its tenth. Only the search engine, Google, of the firms that in the internet decade have emerged as the big four of online business, is younger. In their brief history, most online businesses have found profits harder to come by than publicity. Many early stars crumbled to dust (remember Webvan, pets.com and Boo.com?), and Amazon's string of losses (which touched $1.4 billion in 2000) only turned to profits in 2003. Though quarterly results this week from eBay, Yahoo! and Google show their already healthy profits to be growing strongly, none of today's online successes feels able to rest on its laurels. Each is trying to move beyondits original source of revenue-selling books and an ever-growing list of other goods (Amazon); auctions (eBay); online advertising (Yahoo!); and "contextual" advertising (Google)-by adopting the successful strategies of its rivals.