The three survivors

Yahoo, Amazon, eBay -- the only three big Internet firms to have survived since the web's earliest days. Even as hundreds of other dotcoms fell by the wayside at the turn of the century, these three made it through the great Internet crisis and have since prospered, to varying degrees and at different times. Their fates have reflected the evolution of the web as a whole, and now suggest its future direction. For many years eBay and Yahoo! made more money than Amazon, which, as a capital-intensive retailer, struggled longer with losses and then made profits at lower margins. And yet, says Pip Coburn of Coburn Ventures, an investment adviser, Yahoo! is now drifting and eBay is a washed-up quasi-monopoly, whereas Amazon finds itself at the Internet's cutting edge.
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