During the 1970s and 1980s, there was much skepticism about Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT). Could the company keep up its growth? What about the huge amounts spent on technology, distribution, and logistics? And, could the company compete in urban locations?

Interestingly, another game-changing retailer -- Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) -- has been facing the same kinds of criticism. Yet, the company keeps proving its detractors wrong. After all, during one of the worst Christmas seasons last year, Amazon.com posted a strong performance.

Analyst upgrades:

• JP Morgan upgraded J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP) to Neutral from Underweight based on lower input costs, stabilization in home, lower markdown dollars, and valuation.
• Oppenheimer upgraded Novellus (NASDAQ: NVLS) to Perform from Underperform as it believes Novellus' market share has stabilized and that the company is a potential acquisition target. The firm raised its price target to $20 from $9.
• Bernstein upgraded ConAgra (NYSE: CAG) to Market Perform from Underperform citing strength in grains and moderating input costs.
• ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) was raised to Buy from Neutral at Goldman.
• China Housing (NASDAQ: CHLN) was upgraded to Buy from Hold at Roth Capital.

Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) remains as the only large national retailer in the U.S. that deals in the consumer electronics realm. Its largest competitor, Circuit City, is a month away from ceasing to exist (in liquidation), and even with the economy causing consumers to pinch their collective wallets, Best Buy will emerge again once the economy does the same. Or, not.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) cheap?

The stock is trading in the mid-$60s, and it's almost doubled off its November low. But Amazon has reached far higher -- around $100 in October 2007, and $110 going back to 1999.

More importantly, AMZN is emerging as a retail leader in a lousy economy. Its Web traffic blew away the competition during the crucial holiday season, and its most-recent earnings number crushed expectations by 33%.

Put simply, Amazon.com has figured out how to grow the top and bottom lines in a terrible environment.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is scheduled to discuss fourth-quarter 2008 results today in a conference call at 5:00 PM ET. You can catch the live webcast of the call on the company's investor relations website.

For the quarter that saw the "best holiday season ever," analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Amazon to report a profit of $0.39 per share, compared to $0.48 per share in the same period of the previous year. Revenue for the quarter is expected to total $6.4 billion, down 13.5% from a year ago. But Amazon earnings have topped estimates in recent quarters, by as much as 42.3%.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) announced yesterday that its real-time internet video streaming service would soon be included in many new flat-screen television sets made by LG Electronics. The online DVD rental pioneer is taking huge leaps to get content directly to consumers without using any kind of physical media.

But what about other video streaming services? Perhaps Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Video On Demand, which has more than 40,000 pieces of content to offer?

Although Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) Apple TV product -- which sells for over $200 -- has been on the market for a few years now, the content is limited and the box only works on HDTV sets. A smaller box made by Roku, which was initially only able to offer Netflix's 12,000-piece direct online catalog, will now be offering over 40,000 pieces of content from Amazon.com's Video On Demand service. The $100 box also works with almost any television, although not much of the content if offered from either Netflix or Amazon.com in high-definition yet. Do customers really care? Based on the slow adoption rate and higher price of the high-definition Blu-ray format over standard-definition DVD, not much.

Apple may see some serious competition from Netflix here. The company that practically invented the DVD rental by mail business is now storming heavily into the digital content delivery business, where few companies have been successful. There still is not a popular, mass-market device that brings internet content and delivery directly to television sets. This Roku box -- which now features content from two of the largest online digital libraries -- may be the closest device yet.

We all know that the current economic slowdown was bound to hurt holiday spending, and today we get news of just how much an impact it had on online shopping, as comScore announced that shoppers spent 3% less this year compared with 2007.

The report was based on spending between November 1 and December 23, and showed that consumers spent $25.5 billion online, compared with $26.3 billion in the same period last year, another clear signal that people are cutting their spending because they are worried about the economy.

A bright spot in the report did show that Cyber Monday, the Monday immediately following Black Friday, was the second biggest day ever for online spending, with an increase of 15% in sales from last year, to $846 million in sales.

There are times when technology displaces existing products and services, and times when it augments or supports existing products and services.

Further, while there is little doubt that online news and publishing is displacing newspapers and magazines - - it's at minimum forcing them to revise their missions and alter business models - - the same can not be said, at least at this stage of the digital age, regarding the Internet's impact on books.

Try curling up with a good computer screen

Initially, critics and other observers declared 'the end of books' - - that readers would gravitate toward reading books on computer screens. Reading a book on a computer screen?

Thankfully, the initial panic that gripped book publishers soon faded after what was clear to anyone who reads books became clear to publishing executives during a calmer moment: that the experience of reading a printed book in a traditional setting (such as in your favorite chair in a living room or study, or even on an outdoor deck / patio) is vastly superior to reading a book on a flat panel screen. Try curling up with a good computer screen.

The day after Christmas marks the time for one of my favorite traditions: Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) announcing that it's been the best Christmas ever.

In a press release, the company announced that "the 2008 holiday season finished as its best ever, with over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15, which is a record-breaking 72.9 items per second." The press release was full of useful nuggets like this one: "Amazon sold enough Coldplay CDs that laid side by side they'd stretch from Seattle to Violet Hill (a street in London and the album's first single) and more than halfway back."

Of course, we can all expect public companies to put their best foot forward, but here's the truth: Amazon is a growth company that's invested aggressively in its infrastructure and it should be reporting record holiday sales each year -- which it does -- and then puts out a self-congratulatory press release each year that various news outlets pick up on and report like it's actually news. In case you're playing along at home, here are the company's "best holiday sales ever!!!" press releases going back to 2000:

This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

There's no doubt about it -- times are tough. People are struggling to find work and to pay the bills as the value of their homes and savings dwindle. The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer.

Or do they? It's all relative, of course, but world's billionaires have been taking some big hits too. We take a look at Sheldon Adelson, Kirk Kerkorian, and Lakshmi Mittal in their own separate posts, but here are some other billionaires who have lost billions this year (courtesy of Forbes and Business Sheet).

• Brothers Anil and Mukesh Ambani of India's private conglomerate Reliance lost $32.5 billion and $28.2 billion, respectively.
• Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, lost $16.5 billion. Shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A) are down about 32% since the beginning of the year.
• Microsoft (NYSE: MSFT) founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen lost $12.3 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, while CEO Steve Balmer lost $6.5 billion. Shares of Microsoft are down 46% since the beginning of the year.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin, cofounders of Google Inc. (NYSE: GOOG), lost $11.9 billion and $11.7 billion, respectively, and CEO Eric Schmidt lost $3.8 billion. The share price of Google has fallen 55% since the beginning of the year.
• Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), lost $8.2 billion. Shares of Oracle are down 21% since the beginning of the year.
• Media maven Sumner Redstone lost $7.2 billion. Shares of his private investment firm National Amusements fell 70% this year.

This post is part of a series featuring bargain stocks that are worth a look now. See more Cheap Stocks.

In my opinion, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has two major fundamental advantages. First, we're talking about a dot-com company that survived the dot-com bubble. This is an impressive achievement, on par with Julia Louis-Dreyfus finding success with a second sitcom after Seinfeld.

Second, I caught a bit of Oprah recently when I was home sick with a head cold. Her special guest was Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and the topic of the day was how much Oprah loves the Kindle reader. Not only did everybody in the audience get a free Kindle, but Ms. Winfrey actually bellowed, "Kiiiinnnnnnnnn-dullllllll!" ("Thank you," stammered Bezos, no doubt overwhelmed by her all-powerful stamp of approval.)

Oprah aside, the key to Amazon's survival so far has been its willingness to adapt. What was once a humble online bookstore is now the internet equivalent of a general store -- on today's Amazon.com, you can pick up a new motherboard for your PC, a pair of winter boots, and a box of popcorn in one fell swoop. The company offers a slew of familiar brand names, which should make the site a popular stop for holiday shopping.

This post is part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst in Money 2008 feature.

The digital revolution? The frugalista movement? Social networking? Or As-seen-on-TV products? 2008 has changed the landscape of how we recreate, communicate, shop, and dream. What product would you consider the Best Breakout Product of 2008?

Amazon Kindle

Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle is not the first attempt to replace the paper book with an electronic reader, but it has succeeded (and how -- even now, over a year since its launch, the wait time for a new unit is a couple of months) where others failed for several reasons. The first is the reading experience. The Kindle's cutting-edge electronic paper technology provides crisp, clean print in any light conditions. The device is thin and light enough to carry anywhere, and can store hundreds of books at your fingertips.

The second reason for its success is the access to a huge library of literature, which can be accessed via a built-in wireless link (no computer needed) through the Sprint cell phone system. Virtually all new books are available in Kindle format, and many, many others (190,000 and counting). Top newspapers such as the New York Times also offer Kindle subscriptions, and schools are beginning to adopt it as the platform for electronic versions of textbooks. In the race to lead the transition to electronic books, Amazon's Kindle has broken free of the pack.

A battle royal is shaping up in the world of cloud computing between long-standing dominant software giant Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and its biggest threat of the past few years, internet runaway Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

BusinessWeek is reporting that Microsoft plans to build 20 new data centers over the next few years to serve corporations large and small which would prefer to store their data in a secure environment and be able to access it over the internet. Google started along the same path several years ago with the same goal.

The data centers are likely to cost as much as a billion dollars each. Companies opting to use this type of service will be delegating the acquisition, maintenance, and security required to store large amounts of data while preserving capital for core business activities.

One novel approach in Microsoft's newest facility is to fill the 700,000 square-foot floor with prepackaged shipping containers instead of acres of racks containing servers. Each of the containers can hold 2,500 servers, and the floor can hold up to 224 containers. That's a potential maximum of 560,000 servers.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) hit a 52-week low yesterday, a week after the online retailer saw a previous year low. Worries about this year's retail holiday shopping season have investors fleeing like rats on a sinking ship. Analyst Matt Nemer with Thomas Weisel lowered his Q4 earnings estimate on the retailer from $0.44 per share to $0.39 per share, while Barclays analyst Douglas Ammuth indicated that Q4 profit margins could shrink as price cuts go into effect.

Still, Amazon.com has one of the best chances to weather the consumer spending slowdown starting, well, yesterday. Almost everyone I know is already shopping for the holidays, and many are shopping online and are definitely searching out bargains. While the management of companies that run shopping malls in my area are considering bankruptcy, standalone retailers with strong brands and good customer perception appear to be doing fine. I'm left wondering how long that can last, though.

Amazon's shares have come back from the stratosphere and have settled into what could be considered a normal range. The company is making money, making profits and is very strong in almost every area in which it operates. It's the world's largest online-only retailer and unlike many other retailers, I've never seen the company say that it makes a huge percentage of its profit in the end-of-year holiday shopping season. All things considered, my guess is that Amazon.com will do fine this season. Not stupendous, but fine.

This is the fourth in a four part series which I hope gives buyers, sellers, shareholders and dare I say management a platform for discussion.

This week I envisioned an eBay (NASADQ: EBAY) without Skype, eBay Motors and Paypal. Everything goes to the highest bidder, excluding handling and delivery of course.

While EBay might benefit from selling Skype and Motors, considering they might be worth more to others like Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and AutoNation Inc. (NYSE:AN), it should not sell PayPal unless it is contemplating a merger, since the acquiring company most likely would want PayPal to be an integral part of any deal.

Ebay is going through some growing pains right now but it is still a primary center of activity on the web. Although there are many disgruntled sellers that have left the site or been forced off because of the constant changes in the rules, it really has only one main rival and that is Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN).