The End Of The Amazon Era

This week, Amazon debuted its new toys and electronics departments. Jeff Bezos newly-revealed vision for the allegedly hip, once-revolutionary website has been revealed: a tacky online K-Mart. You're as likely to see a Pokemon critter or digital camera as a book there these days. Is this what all those investors were counting on? Get on over to Fatbrain.com immediately and sign up because the new Amazon sucks profoundly.

What do all these diverse products have in common? If you guessed nothing, you win a free Pokemon Pileup, Amazon.Toys.com's "cunning critter" of the day on Tuesday, a day on which Amazon gave a perfunctory nod to Alice Hoffman's new novel "Local Girls" but was much more excited about (and gave more space to) what it called "Aural Fixation: Superb audio performance and fine-quality construction put the Harman Kardon FL8550 five-disc CD changer on the shortlist of stellar CD players under $1,000!"

Doesn't the hipper-than-life-itself Jeff Bezos know that books, toasters and Disney marketing tie-ins don't really work together? That they are distinctly different businesses, with different identities catering to different audiences? Bezos has tossed away his biggest advantage, the sense right or wrong that he was creating a different kind of company with something resembling an ethical sensibility.

He was only kidding. (Don't forget to link to drugstore.com on Amazon's home page for some aspirin, in case this column or those CDs give you a headache, in which case your geek buddies can send you a "Friendship" or "Love" E-card from Amazon's "E-Card" section).

Amazon was always as much mythical as real, as much hype as numbers. It always said more about the inadequate way we perceive and report on technologies like the Net than about books. Few companies have ever attracted more interest and publicity and made less money. Amazon's whiz-bang software - with its recommendation programs and one-click shopping - made Net book-buying a pleasure to thousands of people for the first time. And Bezos's public relations skills were as good as anyone's on the Web. He persuaded investors, business journalists and users that Amazon was a quasi-hip, rebellious alternative to the big bad chain stores.

Guess what? Amazon is now a lot worse than they are.

But that's over. Its distinct identity squandered, Amazon is truly a millenial corporation now. It does at least five things other companies and sites - eBay, MP3, Toys R Us, Fatbrain.com, BN.com - have done first or do better, and it's doing all of them at a loss. What a formula. And a cautionary tale. When it comes to doing digital business, hype is not only obnoxious, but nobody can really afford it anymore.

Comments

And what planet are you from today?

[sobiloff]

Sorry, Jon, but your article misses the mark with me. I never idolized Amazon as anything other than a more convenient bookstore, but apparently you did. Stores can't make money with books anymore; Amazon is selling the NYT Best Sellers list at a loss, and as a whole their book business hasn't turned a profit yet, either. They have to branch out to other markets where there is still profit to be made. And, because the Amazon name has great market recognition, they're leveraging it. Simple business, not moral decay and a fall from grace.

Re:And what planet are you from today?

[J. Pierpont]

Right you are. It seems to me that Jon's perception of the internet is clouded by the gee-whiz, super-dooper-revolutionary, change-the-world, wear-shiny-clothes attitude that was popularized by Wired (when it was worth reading). It's the same attitude that makes the people who actually use the thing for pretty humdrum and mundane daily work annoyed at the very concept of a JonKatz. It's also the same thing that makes Nick. Negroponte so damned annoying. I read "Being Digital" and was just plain bothered. It's fine and dandy that all of this stuff is revolutionary and new, but who gives a rat's tush if it isn't useful for some reason. Amazon.com, though it might have lost its 'new media purity' is, still, a business. And it is, still, a useful tool for consumers. And that's all that matters. When I want to get hardware, I go to Sears. I don't go to a trendy, new-age hardware shop. I go to the best place for the product. It doesn't matter if they've sold out or not.

Now, if Amazon did start sucking significantly (sucking is purposefully vague, there), I would go somewhere else. That's capitalism. I don't like it very much, but it typically gets the job done.

-awc