Why Amazon's Jeff Bezos is not the new Steve Jobs

YESTERDAY'S guest author blog on CNBC was by Richard L. Brandt and headlined 'Is Jeff Bezos the New Steve Jobs?'

"That'll be a 'yes' then," I thought cynically, Brandt being the author of One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com, published today. Persuade us that Bezos is the new Jobs, and we'll buy more copies of his book – on Amazon, probably – and Brandt will do well.

But if we go on thinking – if we think of him at all – that Mr Bezos is a jug-eared monomaniac from space who runs a great big warehouse that's sending hundreds of small businesses to the wall because we're all too idle to get off our arses and go down to the shops, then we're more likely to think "Sod Jeff Bezos" and spring instead for the latest Stephen King. If there is a latest Stephen King. Which there's bound to be.

So it's a testament to Brandt's ethics as an author with a living to earn that he (despite what The Wall Street Journal, among others, says) concludes that Jeff Bezos is not the new Steve Jobs.

Not that Bezos probably cares. He is, after all, the Original Jeff Bezos.

He may, of course, be a bit peevish that One Click is, as I write, #2,897 in books on Amazon, while Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs – also out this week – is #1.

He's probably even more annoyed about having to publish figures this week showing that Amazon's third-quarter profits had dropped almost three-quarters, although sales were nearly 50 per cent up.

Blame it – as Amazon has done – on investment in the new Kindle Fire tablet computer. But it's nothing new. Amazon's never been known for market-busting operating margins, said to be under five per cent compared with around 20 per cent for most high-tech companies.

And this should matter.

The big difference between Jobs and Bezos is that Jobs obsessively loved the product and wanted it to be, in his eyes, perfect. Do that (he thought) and the users will come. He operated on the better-mousetrap principle.

Bezos, on the other hand, loves the market. The precis – actually, tellingly, it's called 'Product Description' – of Brandt's book on the Amazon site sums it up.

"Amazon's business model is deceptively simple," it reads. "Make online shopping so easy that customers won't think twice."

And if what you love is the market, then your measure of how you're doing isn't insanely great stuff, but hard profit.

It's easy to see Bezos as a massively hyper-trophied Del Boy. Doesn't matter to him what, just sell it cheaper or faster or both. Doesn't matter who goes to the wall, either. Right now, bricks-and-mortar bookshops are taking the hit, but who's next? In the last few weeks ·