Dear America,

I've been looking for some light bulbs for some time lately.  They are for the track lights in our living room and kitchen, and I wanted GU 10 LED bulbs, which can cost $20 or more each if you go to Home Depot or Lowe's and get a brand name.  For some reason--probably because I have bought two such bulbs on the internet and been disappointed with both of them--I eschewed the obvious answer to the problem of locating competing vendors: Amazon.  But my wife and daughter bought me one of those Kindle notebooks for my birthday, so I have been trying to use it out of appreciation, and because it is an Amazon product, there is a button on the home page by which you can not only go to your own account on Amazon, you can by things with a single push of a button if you are a member of Amazon Prime.  So I started looking through what Amazon had to offer--and it must be remembered when one shops on Amazon that it is now more like the e-bay of consumer commerce than it is a single vendor--and I found what I was looking for on the first page, consumer ratings, specifications and descriptions and all.  So, I ordered the bulbs...10 of them for about $65...and I can expect delivery on Thursday.  In every respect, this sale and one or two more I have purchased over the past few weeks since my birthday, was a stellar success for both Amazon and me, but today, I started thinking about Amazon's beginnings when the "dot com" era first started.  You may recall that in the beginning, it was only books that they sold, and Jeff Bezos, the human incarnation of Amazon then and now, was just another e-commerce whiz kid with a reputation for making money our of nothing.  But unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and the rest, Bezos has never really been tarnished by his pursuit of self-interest.  He was in a little trouble early on when it turned out that selling books alone on the internet was not going to be a big deal, and he...and Amazon for that matter...went through a crisis of credibility for some time, but all the while, Bezos was amending his original business plan, and eventually, he went from questionable would-be genius to venerable business innovator with a perpetually changing future.  In fact, he was doing all this relatively sub rosa, and still is, which leaves him considerably more enigmatic than, say, Bill Gates, who goes about touting the $ billion or two that he gives away each year as if it's some kind of sacrifice that he should be lauded for or Larry Ellison, who thinks that dedicating millions to getting thrashed in The Americas Cup is a noble pursuit while people who don't have insurance die of diseases that can be cured because they don't have enough money.  Of course, Steve Jobs' crass pursuit of some kind of telephone hegemony for the sake of being dominant and richer than anyone else at the expense of clerks whom he called geniuses instead of paying them a living wage fits in there nicely too.

It should be noted that there may well be something as Machiavellian in Bezos' private mind, but as far as manifesting it in action is concerned, even at his most self-interested, he doesn't display the kind of crazed megalomania that the others of his class of captains of industry, or robber barons if you choose, seem to demonstrate.  For example, he bought the Washington Post...he, Jeff Bezos himself, bought the Washington Post, not Amazon...and if you were at all as suspicious as the creations of the aforementioned evil geniuses would justify, you would have to wonder why.  When he made the purchase there was a lot of speculation in the media about the reason, but I saw immediately what he would do, and sure enough, he did it.  Amazon offers the Washington Post at a severe discount, though other than the sub $40 per annum price that it is going for at the moment I don't know the terms of sale.  But as to those terms, Bezos seems to be building Amazon Prime, which is Amazon's new corporate masthead, into a new version of Amazon as a whole, which will make money by charging a membership fee in lieu of all kinds of benefits and considerations.  For example, as a member of Amazon Prime, those light bulbs I bought are being sent to me free of shipping charges.  And in the bargain, we get Amazon Prime on our smart TV (smart TV seems like an oxymoron to me, but no body asked my opinion), which offers not only the episodes of network programs from the not-too-distant past for us to see, but is beginning to offer some original content as well.  So Amazon Prime is giving me an inducement to use it in the form of offering me a compendious catalog of the products I want, a world-class newspaper virtually for free as a counterweight to the ever more pandering network "news" programs, and an alternative to the mind-numbing sameness of the police procedural laden commercial networks...all for $99 per year.  How Machiavellian is that...or is it Machiavellian at all.

It may be that of all the newly minted billionaires in the electronic firmament, he is the only real star.  It may be that he simply wants to take a good portion of the vigorish out of modern free-market commerce instead of giving it to overpaid diletanttes who skim over the waters of our economy from job to job collecting huge stacks of money for doing nothing but taking meetings on the golf course.  Maybe Bezos sees that you can make money by being fare to consumers and giving them what they really want rather than manufacturing oversized phones and then ginning up demand for them from simple-minded people who just have to have the latest thing.  Maybe he isn't a sybarite, but rather is a Robin Hood trying to give to all of us what Gates, Ellison and Jobs have thought should be all theirs.  It could be that Jeff Bezos is the last rich good guy we'll ever see...maybe even the first.

Your friend,

Mike