One of Mr. Bezos's friends has jokingly described his management style as "ready, fire, steer." But by the fall of 2001, when Amazon had accumulated $2.9 billion in losses, the line didn't seem so funny. The mantra was no longer "get big fast" but "go-hi-o," or "get our house in order."When they talk about Mr. Bezos, former Amazon executives tend to gush.
Mr. Eskenazi, the former human relations director, described him as an immensely likable man, as "down to earth as any billionaire can be." People who worked closely with him talk glowingly of his ability to lead and inspire, and of his brainpower.
Danny Shader, who worked at Amazon for 15 months starting in 1999 after Amazon bought his start-up for roughly $200 million, described Mr. Bezos as "the smartest, best entrepreneur I've ever met in my life, and will ever meet."
Almost to a person, though, former employees said Mr. Bezos was incapable of delegating. "The good and the bad of Jeff is that he wanted to be involved with every new Web change, even if it was just to change the colors of a tab," said Brian Lent, a top technologist who worked in an office maybe 40 feet from Mr. Bezos's for most of his two years there.
Some also criticized Mr. Bezos for having killed promising companies after Amazon bought them. It acquired Junglee, a database search company, and sought to transform its core technology into an e-commerce search engine that could find any product for sale on the Internet. Mr. Bezos ended the project less than 18 months after it began.
Mr. Lent, who came to Amazon via Junglee, noted that commercial search was now one of the Internet's hotter areas. "Amazon could have owned the shopping-comparison market," he said. Instead, it is now battling to enter a field dominated by Google.
Mr. Shader expressed a similar disappointment that Accept.com, his early entry into the online payment market now dominated by PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, never realized its potential. "Quite literally we could've been PayPal if things had worked out differently," he said.
Mr. Bezos declined to comment on what might have been. "We made the decisions we made, and we have an outcome we're pretty happy with," he said.
He prefers to talk about tomorrow more than yesterday, even as the company gears up for a 10-year anniversary party with performances by Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.
Analysts, however, want to talk about today, and to discuss Amazon's slowing sales abroad, its rapidly rising costs, and the $55 million spent in the first three months of the year on its free-shipping promotion.
Mr. Bezos brushed off these and other complaints. From the first shareholder letter he wrote back in 1997, he has consistently made clear that he would run Amazon by focusing on the future and shrugging off short-term worries. He said he would "relentlessly slash prices," even if it cut into incremental profits, because he was convinced that it was the right thing to do.
Similarly, he vowed that more than a million Amazon customers would receive the latest installment of the "Harry Potter" series this Saturday, the day the new book is released, though the company would most likely lose money on the sale of those books. "We genuinely believe by taking care of the customer," he said, "we'll create the best circumstances for shareholders as well."
DESPITE himself, Mr. Bezos has managed to please analysts on occasion. Over the years, he has spent well over $1 billion building Amazon's infrastructure - and in 2001, he began cashing in on that investment by renting out space on Amazon's Web site to retailers ranging from Target and Circuit City to mom-and-pop shops. Third-party deals, which cut across all of Amazon's categories, now account for 27 percent of the company's revenue, or nearly $2 billion.
Yet in the end that has served to frustrate analysts as they wonder why profits are falling, given Amazon's successful entry into a high-margin business like renting space on its site.
"We don't claim over the long term we're necessarily correct," Mr. Bezos said. "We just claim it's our viewpoint. We don't spend a lot of time defending ourselves."
To Mr. Anderson, the technology newsletter editor, Mr. Bezos's relentless focus on the customer - at the expense of his other audience, his shareholders - is "both Jeff's brilliance and his curse."
"If you're a long-term investor, you're probably thinking that it will be worth a lot of money to be the Wal-Mart of the online world," Mr. Anderson said.
"On the other hand," he added, "if you're the kind of investor who has run out of patience, you're probably wondering whether there's any trained management in place that knows how to get a return on investment."