Earth to Bezos: Start another company
There's a phrase for startup founders who quickly tire of running just one company and want a new toy to play with: serial entrepreneurs. Or even parallel entrepreneurs, who stay at one company while founding another.
Jeff Bezos should be one of those. But the Amazon founder instead chose to hijack his retail business and turn it into a computing rental service, cannibalizing the company's resources by selling hard drive storage and elements of Amazon's backend system.
That might be doable if Bezos was only capitalizing on unused company property. But instead, he's bringing in new engineers and upgrading systems. It's a mess — it's like a hellish version of the double Outkast album, but with Side B done by Will Shatner.
Bezos's spending is one thing keeping Amazon's profit margin lower than that of Wal-mart and Borders and its net income possibly half of last year's. He's killing one company to make another, and the question is — why not buy out a chunk of Amazon, hire away the developers who built its great backend, and start this new venture outside the troubled company? Lord knows he could get the funding.
