The first time I met Jeff Bezos, he was trying to sell me something. It was April 1999, and he'd just bought Accept.com, a person-to-person payments business. Bezos was vague about his plans, but my understanding was that he was planning to do to the money-transfer business what he'd already done to booksellers. Of course, it never happened. Amazon buried the business in trying to integrate it. Accept.com CEO Danny Shader, pictured here in a more enthusiastic moment, departed for more entrepreneurial pastures, and PayPal rose from nowhere to take over the online-payments business. Now, I read that Amazon is trying to make up for eight years of lost time by launching its own PayPal competitor, and take on Google Checkout as well. Good luck with that, Jeff.

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