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Under Jeff Bezos, Amazon has ever played the chameleon, morphing from bookstore to discounter to supermarket. Most recently, it's tried, through the guise of its Amazon Web Services arm, to get people to think of it as a supercomputer to rent. Amazon's earnings were financially solid: The company raked in $1.4 billion in operating cash flow, and by more conventional measures, it earned $207 million on $5.7 billion in revenues. You won't read about that in the blogs, though, because Amazon earned that money the old-fashioned way — by shipping books and other physical goods to customers.

Instead, they're entranced by Amazon Web Services. The only notable statistic? That Amazon Web Services consumed more bandwidth than Amazon's own websites. Well, one would hope so, since one of Amazon's chief services is renting out bandwidth.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld acknowledges that "most of the things that tend to interest us here at TechCrunch about Amazon are not yet material to its finances." But that raises the question: Why are they of interest? Amazon likely already enjoys massive discounts on its bandwidth; setting up a system to rent some of it out does not likely improve its cost structure. It does, however, win Amazon priceless PR from gullible bloggers. And it creates uncertainty about what business Amazon is really in — uncertainty which provokes optimism among investors, who can argue Amazon's more than just a bookseller and bid up its shares accordingly. That profit Bezos can take home to the bank.