Disney/Amazon merger? NY Times:
A more hopeful possible scenario is that Amazon.com will get bought. James McQuivey of Forrester Research says, "A company like Disney could afford to spend $20 billion for Amazon," and with that possibility he has pushed the company back out onto the horizon, where he can imagine a perfect partnership of information, entertainment and customers.
But by constantly blowing out the dimensions and focus of the company, Bezos has a way of making even the most recent projections by his skeptics and boosters seem out of date and beside the point. As Bezos, video-game style, keeps taking on ever larger and more ornery opponents while reminding himself that "stress is an orthogonal dimension," he seems to be reveling in the game like a man with all kinds of cards up his sleeve. As Graciela Chichilnisky, a Columbia University economics professor who employed Bezos in her arcane financial services start-up right after he graduated from Princeton, puts it: "In the knowledge sector the key issues are rate of innovation and depth of penetration. He will anticipate the changes. I bet on Jeff Bezos' brain."
In fact, Bezos' claim that by the end of the year, Barnes & Noble would no longer consider him a rival almost seems true. According to Nicole Vanderbilt, an Internet analyst for Jupiter Communications, Amazon.com's real rivals now aren't the lumbering store-based retailers but the other heavily trafficked Internet portals and providers, from AOL to Yahoo!, and now, after its acquisition of USA Networks, Lycos. "As impressive as Amazon's 6.2 million customers are," she says, "AOL has the credit-card numbers of 16.2 million customers."
As he widens his scope, Bezos continues to put more and more of his emphasis on building the Amazon brand. "Brands to a certain degree are like quick-drying cement," he has said. "When they're young, they're stretchable and pliant, but over time they become more and more associated with a particular thing and harder to stretch."
Bezos has often spoken about how the Internet, where prices and services can be compared with a couple clicks, "fundamentally shifts the balance of power from the merchant to the customer." Yet the race by all the big Internet players to get huge fast is based on the opposite assumption: that customers will align themselves early on with one of a couple of names and stay put out of sloth and habit. Bob Pittman, formerly of MTV and now of AOL, has expressed this cynical notion. "Coca-Cola doesn't win the taste test and Microsoft is not the best operating system, but in America brands win." But while Coke and Microsoft started with products and then wrapped them in brands, Amazon.com, which sells other people's products, is almost entirely a creation of branding.
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