Netflix's (NFLX +1.15%) CEO Reed Hastings, in a recent interview with The New York Times, admitted that the company made some big strategic mistakes when it was under competitive pressures in its fight against Blockbuster. Hastings said that Netflix was distracted by other business ideas that looked exciting at the time, but that just served to pull focus away from what really mattered -- its core business. One of those new ideas was launching its own production and distribution studio, called Red Envelope, that's since closed. He called the temptation getting "distracted by the shiny object."
Could Amazon.com (AMZN 0.87%) be making the same mistake now? After all, the e-tailer has been pouring investments into everything from self-produced comedy shows, to the in-house development of tablet hardware, to cloud services for enterprises. In the video below, Fool contributor Demitrios Kalogeropoulos argues that Amazon is better served by focusing on what still makes up close to two-thirds of its business: online retailing.
