As far as names go, Amazon is a perfect choice. (Not least because its ticker symbol, AMZN, is a license-plate version of how the stock has performed.) The wild Amazon River, with its limitless branches, remains an ideal metaphor for a company that now sells everything from power tools to CDs, and is eagerly looking for new areas of expansion. It's possible to argue that Bezos didn't master much more than an evolution of commerce, replacing old-fashioned stores with a centralized sales and shipping center. That one change, he notes, grabbing a favorite word, is "huge." For old-line businesses like K-Mart, getting new customers meant building new stores at a cost of millions. For Bezos, serving new customers costs next to nothing.

And he is still losing his pants. That's maybe the one thing people still really don't understand about the e-commerce revolution. If these are such hot businesses, then why are they hemorrhaging cash? AmazonÐthe company everyone wants to be likeÐcould lose nearly $350 million this year. O.K., the Net is different, but don't profits and losses matter anymore? They do. Bezos insists Amazon's oldest businessesÐbooks, music and videoÐwill be profitable by the end of 2000.

But Amazon's losses are also a sign of the New Economics of Internet commerce. These new rules spring from the idea that in the new global marketplace whoever has the most information wins. While it used to be sellers who had all the information, buyers are getting smarter and smarter.

There is, in all this, a kind of humanness that is exactly the opposite of what online shopping was supposed to be like. The Amazon site allows readers to post their opinions about books, to rate products, to swap anecdotes. As you sit there reading, say, a charming book review from Bangladesh, the real power of the Amazon brand comes home. It is a site that is alive with uncounted species of insight, innovation and intellect. No one predicted that electronic shopping could possibly feel this alive. If it is a sign of an e-world yet to come, a place in which technology allows all of us to shop, communicate and live closer together, then Jeff Bezos has done more than construct an online mall. He's helped build the foundation of our future.

Questions

1. Why was Jeff Bezos selected as Time's Person of the Year? In what ways has he "seen the future"?
2. What are the Web's "New Economics"?