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A Fool Looks Back

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz | More Articles
December 3, 2011 | Comments (0)

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Is Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) ready to take on Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN  ) ?

The always cryptic "people familiar with the matter" are telling The Wall Street Journal that the world's leading search engine wants to begin offering an Amazon Prime-like service, offering overnight delivery across several third-party merchants.

It's easy to see why Google is concerned about Amazon Prime. Amazon's popular loyalty club means that its millions of members check Amazon.com first when they're looking for something to buy, bypassing Big G's search engine and its product-search feature.

Google's strategy is sound on paper, but Google isn't the first company to aim at Amazon Prime. ShopRunner has gotten an impressive network of retailers, including Toys "R" Us and The Sports Authority, to offer free two-day shipping to members paying $79 a year. In other words, Google is going to have to settle for the retailers that don't fulfill through Amazon or have an existing relationship with ShopRunner.

If Google is serious, why doesn't it just buy ShopRunner?

I guess we'll have to wait for the "people familiar with the matter" to get a little more chatty about concrete details.

Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.

  • Upscale yoga apparel retailer lululemon athletica (Nasdaq: LULU  ) saw its stock tumble after posting softer-than-expected top-line growth. Relax, investors. Break out the yoga mats.
  • Clearwire (Nasdaq: CLWR  ) got through to Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S  ) on a collect call. Sprint will kick in $1.6 billion over the next few years to give the WiMAX network provider the financial freedom to get through its current debt-repayment milestones and build out its LTE platform.
  • Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX  ) posted healthy gains after offering up positive results for its experimental hepatitis C treatment. It's always encouraging for pharmaceutical companies to have flowing pipelines. Just ask Pfizer (NYSE: PFE  ) , whose Lipitor patent just ran out in this country.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz

The Steve Jobs Betrayal
You may already know that in the final year of his life, Jobs revealed a stunning betrayal — and told his biographer, "I will spend my last dying breath... and every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong." What was it that made Jobs so irate — and why could it make a few in-the-know investors some major profits over the coming months and years?

Enter your email address below to find out what made Jobs so enraged!

The Motley Fool owns shares of lululemon athletica and Google. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Amazon.com, Google, lululemon athletica, and Pfizer. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools don't all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz calls them as he sees them. He owns no shares in any of the stocks in this story and is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.


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Related Tickers

5/25/2012 4:00 PM
LULU $72.06 Down -0.61 -0.84%
Lululemon Athletic… CAPS Rating: **
PFE $22.13 Down -0.01 -0.05%
Pfizer, Inc. CAPS Rating: ****
S $2.62 Up +0.09 +3.56%
Sprint Nextel Corp CAPS Rating: **
INHX.DL $0.00 Down +0.00 +0.00%
Inhibitex Inc. CAPS Rating: *
AMZN $212.89 Down -2.35 -1.09%
Amazon.com CAPS Rating: ***
CLWR $1.21 Down -0.01 -0.82%
Clearwire Corp CAPS Rating: **
GOOG $591.53 Down -12.13 -2.01%
Google CAPS Rating: ****

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