I've watched amazon go downhill (in the "increasing chaos" sense) for a long time. It wasn't the videos or music that did it for me, it was the auctions. I primarily go to amazon to read the reader reviews of books, and the "You might also like books by..." section. Well, one day I hit a page and discovered that I now had to scroll to get to those, because there was a big old honkin' section of stuff for auction that I might be interested in. Excuse me? What kind of engine decided that, since I was looking at Dan Simmons' Hyperion, that I might also be interested in some Power Rangers childrens pajamas? It got all the worse when he assimilated pharmacy.com, so now I can only wonder what sort of book I have to search for in order to get it to recommend some Viagra.

There are more bookstore choices now, absolutely. But I'm still using Amazon for a couple of key reasons:

• The recommendation engine, as I said. It doesn't always nail it. I don't go to the personal recommendations (because between buying gifts, sci-fi novels and books for work, it never knows what I want), but the "Readers who liked X also bought Y..." section is useful to me.
• Gifts. I have some long distance friends that I send books to. Amazon is great in this respect, because not only will it giftwrap, it actually remembers the addresses of my friends so I can just click.
• Amazon has succeeded, for me, in becoming the book version of IMDB. If I need to know something about a book, my fingers just know how to get me there. If they're not really doing anything wrong, why leave?

I don't like that he's branching all over the place, especially when it makes it harder for me to get the information I want. But the fact is, I still can get the information I want. Until he changes that, I'm not likely to switch providers.