Remember, five years ago "online corporate web sites" were little better than electronic brochures -- the use of technology to facilitate the same forms of advertising that companies used anyway. They were a part of the overall communications strategy. The real visionaries (and shows like Marketplace and All Things Considered did stories on this) were the companies that used free giveaways as excuses to get demographic information from the readers of their website.

E-commerce? Didn't exist. You were lucky if you could find online credit card applications.

Amazon.com showed, simply, that not only could you sell things online... you could sell things much much better online. And that with planning and foresight, you could make a lot of money and have relatively little overhead.

That changed the world. Without Amazon.com, we wouldn't have eTrade or eBay or the ability to configure and order a Saturn on their website or online direct-to-consumer channels for everything from watches (I bought my Timex from timex.com) to stamps. Last night, I was angry because I couldn't find a web site that would let me order a money order and send it out for me, with a credit card number. I'm used to being able to shop for or buy anything online.

Genius.

It's a pity that the visionary/pus-for-brains line isn't a little easier to see.

You see, Amazon.com has spent their entire career running a little scared. Scared people wouldn't accept them, first. Then scared that competitors would put them out of a job. Barnes and Noble was the really big boogyman for them -- the same way that Barnes and Noble was making it hard for independent bookstores to survive, they could throw an operation on the web and put Amazon.com under. That was the feeling, at least.

(In those days, Amazon.com was considered an independent bookseller, and independent bookstores around the country thought of them as their radical new little brother, and were very protective of it. Today, independent bookstores use profanity about Amazon.com they'd never use for Borders or Barnes and Noble. The chairman of the now bankrupt Lauriet's chain directly blames Amazon.com for putting them out of buisness.)

So, Amazon.com worked very hard to not only be a great bookstore, but the best possible Internet citizen. E-Commerce was a dirty word back then -- internet users hated anything commercial on their beloved Net, so to survive they had to add value to the site that anyone could use. They added interactive reviews and gave store credit to the best ones. They created notification programs that let you know when new books from your favorite authors came out. They let people set things up so anyone could sell books through Amazon on their own web sites, so that people could review books and sell them -- and even get a miniscule taste of the money. (I do the last myself, and will continue to do it on the review site, just so you know.) They wanted to keep ahead of the curve, so that Barnesandnoble.com would always seem too little, too late.

And then other places started appearing. eBay, for example. Just another online auction house (those hit a couple of years back, and proved to be great ways to remainder old stock) except you could run your own auctions on it. eBay made its money from fees for listing. E-Trade began to get a lot of news about it -- and other online "day trading" companies. E-Commerce started to hit and hit big.

And Amazon.com seemed to get... well, paranoid. I mean, when you thought e-Commerce, you thought Amazon.com. Now you were thinking other things.

And this is where the pus started to come out.

Here's something from the current "About Amazon.com" page on Amazon.com:

Today, Amazon.com is the place to find and discover anything you want to buy online. We're very proud that 10 million people in more than 160 countries have made us the leading online shopping site. We have Earth's Biggest Selection™ of products, including free electronic greeting cards, online auctions, and millions of books, CDs, videos, DVDs, toys and games, and electronics.

Look at that. Look at that.

"Free electronic greeting cards." "Online auctions." "Millions of books, CDs, videos, DVDs, toys and games, and electronics." And most telling of all -- "Amazon.com is the place to find and discover anything you want to buy online." Emphasis mine, of course.

Do you remember when Apple Computers really began to run into trouble? I do. It's when they had multiple models of LC computers, Quadras and Centrises, along with several models of Powerbook. Then came the Performas, the Powermacs (7100, 8100, 9100, 7200, 7300, 7500, 8500, 8600, 5275, 6100, 6400, 6500, 4400, 5400, 5500, and so on and so on and so on....) and who could possibly remember what else. I still have a comparison chart from a few years back on the wall, of "current products," that lists a good sixty models of computer. Each one designed with a specific type of user in mind.

When people can't visualize your product, they lose sight of what it is. They forget about it. And a market segment of one can't support a product line once they've bought it.

Contrast that with Dell. "What can we build for you?" Or Gateway in the cow boxes. Even though those machines were far more generic, they were singularly distinctive. Apple was dilute.

When did Apple make a splash and their money? When they released truly distinctive computers and simplified their product lines. They have one Powerbook. One iMac (in five colors, but all the same machine). One PowerMac. (I was stunned when the blue tower PowerMac G3's vanished from their site after they announced the G4's). One consumer iBook. One professional Powerbook.

Four computer lines, all distinct and easy to visualize. Plus one laser printer.

Five straight quarters of profits, folks, following years of being in the red. Apple bounced back, and the simplicity of their line did it.

Now Amazon.com is staring at Apple's path, and they've started down it. Barnesandnoble.com offered books? Great. Amazon.com looked at a real live Barnes and Nobles and added a music section. It wasn't nearly as good, of course. How could it be? They didn't have another warehouse they could stack every CD in print in, at least at that point. That they were competing directly with CDNow didn't matter. That wasn't enough? Add video and DVD's -- pay no attention to online video cellers or DVD Express. People buy gifts online? Put in a gift shop. An electronics shop. A toy shop. A game shop.

And if you can't crack a market segment, buy the company that has. Amazon.com started with drugstore.com, then picked up a sporting goods online store at Gear.com and a pet supply store at pets.com.

When people can't visualize your product, they lose sight of what it is. They forget about it.

And it doesn't end there. Amazon.com seems driven to get in every pie. eBay makes a ton of money being an online auction house? Fine. Amazon.com becomes an Auction House. Boom. People use online greeting card services? Fine. Amazon.com will put up electronic greeting cards. (Take that, Hallmark.com). People start buying groceries online? Find -- Amazon.com will buy Homegrocer.com, and now people in Seattle and Portland, Oregon can buy their groceries online and have them del--

Wait. Why would an international company want a local grocery store?

Why would a bookseller want to sell electronics? Want to have a sporting goods store? Want to have auctions?

They're diluting their market presence, folks. And they can't can't can't can't can't make it doing this. They simply can't be all things to all people. Not when other companies out there do it better. Amazon.com won't be able to do auctions as well as eBay does, because eBay hasn't lost track of what their core business is. As a result, people associate auctions with eBay. Not with Amazon.com.

To drum up support for all their new services, Amazon.com started putting targeted advertising for them on their core pages -- which is to say their bookseller pages. At first it was too obtrusive -- sudden advertising for e-Cards or auctions or music on the same page as the book you just looked up annoyed people, and they complained. So it got toned down. Even now it happens, though. When I look for The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Heinlein -- a mass market paperback -- I also get three links to auctions and the current bid price on those auctions.

It's gotten so bad that their front page is now a Welcome page. Before, it was a Book Page, about books. Now there are some books, and videos, and auctions, and so on, and so on... you have to go to another page to get the same book related information they used to open with.

Meanwhile, Barnesandnoble.com has done books. Well. They also sell music (like in their stores) and magazines (like in their stores) and Starbuck coffee by the pound (like in their stores). In other words, they have translated the Barnes and Noble experience electronically.

And that's it. No greeting cards. No DVD players. No auctions. Just lots of links about books. The same if you go to Borders.com. Perhaps best of all, Powells, a legendary used and new independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, has a site that does most if not all of what the original Amazon.com did.

How bad is it? In popular press, Amazon.com is generally still referred to as an online bookseller, but Barnesandnoble.com is usually mentioned too.

That's the death toll for Amazon.com. By losing sight of the brass ring and trying to grab every ring out there -- by trying to become the ubiquitious, one stop online e-commerce experience, Amazon.com has lost their place as the ubiquitious example of e-commerce. Now, their greatest competitor and fear is mentioned in the same breath they are. And their press shares time with eBay. With E*Trade. With Ameritrade.

And they're still not making a profit, but now it's beginning to seem that... well... maybe they don't have a successful master plan. Maybe they're not visionaries. Maybe they have pus-for-brains.

Well, investors don't. And sooner or later, Amazon.com is going to be in a lot of trouble.

I'm waiting for the announcement than you can buy and sell stocks on their site.