Bezos quote
From Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "There Are Going to Be Tens of Thousands of Winners" (July 12, 1999) on BusinessWeek.
Q: The traditional media company argument is that they have the customers, that they have the relationships with consumers, and they need to figure out how to exploit them.
A: For some of those companies that's true. Disney really is an example of a company that has fantastic relationships in many many ways and in many many cases with lots of their customers. But remember, customers don't have a single relationship. The Internet isn't going to change that. People talk a little bit about this as if customers are only going to have one relationship. And I'm talking more about Internet companies than about traditional media companies.
The other common myth is the winner-take-all mentality that a lot of people assign to Internet-related businesses. There are in my opinion going to be tens of thousands of winners in all kinds of categories. The online-commerce world is going to be as richly varied as the "real" world. And just consider that already Disney sells things direct, through retail distribution, through their theme parks and in other ways.
Well sure, if these tens of thousands of companies don't have to pay royalties on basic brain-dead ideas like single-click checkout...