Like others who monitor Amazon, Mr. Anderson rattles off a number of criticisms of Mr. Bezos - for example, that he is reluctant to share power and that his company has had a high rate of executive turnover.But the doubts of Mr. Anderson and others about Mr. Bezos boil down to a chronic Amazon sticking point: profitability. In its most recent quarterly report, in April, Amazon said profit fell 29.7 percent from the corresponding period a year earlier, and Mr. Bezos warned Wall Street to expect profit margins to shrink further this quarter.
A few years ago, Amazon and eBay dominated online commerce. But where eBay's performance and stock price have surpassed its bubble-era highs, Amazon is still about 70 percent off the stock market high-water mark of $113 a share it set in December 1999. Its stock closed at $34.74 a share on Friday; it has fallen almost 22 percent this year, after having dropped 16 percent in 2004. Currently, 18 of the 23 financial analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call have a hold or sell rating on the stock.
"The question that needs to be asked," Mr. Anderson said, "is how many years of declining stock performance will a board tolerate before they finally say, 'Listen, we need to make a change.' "
THE founders of Yahoo, David Filo and Jerry Yang, ran that company for only a few months before its financial backers hired a professional manager to take over as chief executive. The investors behind eBay and Google did the same, though both waited several years before making a move.
There have been notable exceptions - including Microsoft and Dell, whose founders (both college dropouts) ran them for at least a decade after the companies went public. But in general, the practice in the technology world is to bring in an experienced manager who can earn Wall Street's respect, either shortly after the founding of a company or just before it goes public.
In 2000, when Amazon was six years old and bleeding cash, analysts began asking whether Mr. Bezos was still the best person to lead the company. "Time for Bezos to Step Aside?" asked the headline of an article in The Puget Sound Business Journal in 2001. The article quoted Gary Lutin, an investment banker who had repeatedly contacted Mr. Bezos on behalf of the New York Society of Security Analysts - in part to demand that Amazon spell out a succession plan.
"Jeff Bezos is justifiably considered a brilliant person," Mr. Lutin was quoted as saying. "But his brilliance has been exhibited so far in the area of stock promotion rather than running a business."
Amazon's board seemed to acknowledge that point tacitly when, in June 1999, it hired Joseph Galli Jr., a marketing executive from Black & Decker, as president and chief operating officer. "There was a concern at one point that we needed to strengthen the operational side of things, which is why we brought in Joe," said one director, Thomas A. Alberg, in an interview last month.
Mr. Galli, however, lasted only 13 months, choosing to accept the top post at Verticalnet, a technology company with a fraction of Amazon's revenue. When he left, the board conferred the president's title on Mr. Bezos, its chairman and chief executive, and since then the company has made do without a chief operating officer.
"It's our feeling that the other managers and Jeff, too, have grown into their ability to focus on operational things," Mr. Alberg said. Whether Mr. Bezos was the best person to run the company's day-to-day operations, even when the stock was 95 percent off its high, was never broached, he said.
Mr. Bezos laughed when asked whether the board had ever expressed dissatisfaction with his performance. He laughed again when asked about a 2003 helicopter crash that he survived with only minor injuries but that raised the succession question in a more dramatic way, and he laughed one more time when reminded of how some people jokingly replaced "com" with "con" and called his company Amazon.con.
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