I completely disagree. I think Amazon.come is absolutely amazing, and I do the vast majority of my shopping through it. Bezos's intention was to offer everything under the sun when he started the company, hence the name Amazon, because of it's diversity in terms of number of species that exists there.

I compare my experience with Newegg, and although I've bought some stuff from Newegg, I will generally go with Amazon, even if it's a few dollars more expensive, because I trust Amazon so much more, and the entire experience is so much better. I'm basically their model customer, and they have me hook, line, and sinker, especially with Amazon Prime.

Maybe that was his intention, but it's hard to deny that the main focus of Amazon was (and may continue to be) books. I think it just boils down to whether or not you believe in the aforementioned idea that it's only possible to do one thing really well.

Anecdotaly, I had two experiences where my card got flagged by NewEgg, they didn't bother telling me until the next day. I cancelled the order, over nighted it from Amazon for almost exactly the same price.

I cringe every time I have to order something outside of Amazon, dreading a MasterCard secure card, frozen order, mis-packaged products, and any number of other issues that affect my physical goods purchases outside of their system.

I don't think the problem is so much that they're too diversified, its that their search functionality has done a very poor job of keeping up with and supporting that diversification.

It seems that I only have good results when I search for a specific $productname, and even then I get results for products with user comments reading something like "its not $productname but..." or "get a $productname instead". More frustrating is that these seem to be ahead of what I'm actually searching fairly often.

I really think the root problem is their allowance of 3rd-party sellers to create product listings. There needs to be a "master listing" for a specific product, to avoid the current problem of multiple duplicate listings -- which, like you said, may not actually be product X at all, but is product Y instead. It makes Amazon look like eBay.

Don't even get me started the self-published ebook spam -- is Amazon just ignoring it?

I think the problem Amazon has dug for itself is by operating at razor thin profit margins, the volume has to be massive. That of course means crossing into more and more markets, and spreading itself more thin

Is there a formal term for this? Perhaps "the Walmart Effect"? =P