What Does Jeff Bezos' Acquisition of The Washington Post Mean for IT?
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, recently acquired The Washington Post. The move took a lot of industry watchers by surprise and had everyone thinking either about the future of the newspaper itself or the intentions behind Bezos' choosing to buy a newspaper company of all things.
First things first. The acquisition of The Washington Post has nothing to do with Amazon.com because it was Bezos' personal purchase. He didn’t use Amazon's dollars to make the acquisition—but rather used up his own personal finances. The reason for such a decision is hard to fathom, but Bezos is known in the industry to demonstrate long-term thinking.
The people who invest in a long-term project often forego immediate gains, and this usually tends to leave investors nervous. Investors do not always value the long-term outlook as they are out to see short term gains. By not using Amazon's dollars, he has actually managed to keep that fear away—at least for now.
One real possibility that the analysts foresee is converting The Washington Post into a completely digital business while retaining its core. In his memo to employees, Bezos mentions, “I understand the critical role the Post plays in Washington, DC and our nation, and the Post’s values will not change.”
It is thus speculated that the journalistic core of The Washington Post will remain intact, but one can somewhat expect that a new digital way of delivering news content to readers might be on the horizon.
Could it be a new device for reading newspapers? With the advent of the Internet and easy access to world news, many believed that newspapers in their traditional form would die because people may not find them relevant. Here we are, almost twenty years since the Internet's mass popularity, and newspapers still have a place in our lives—though people's reading habits have changed for sure.
Bezos' buying a newspaper company is seen as a step toward coming up with the next version of a Kindle-like device that could just change the way newspapers are read and delivered, much like what Amazon did with books.
Secondly, Amazon has been experimenting a lot with the first day delivery model of various goods. Newspaper business, with its proven delivery model, could help Amazon reach consumers' doorsteps every morning and make way for bundling more services with a newspaper.
Amazon might be innovating advanced delivery systems that require sophisticated information technology—especially for tracking the status and executing an alternate plan when there is a problem. Quoting from Bezos' memo, “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”
Given how under Jeff Bezos Amazon has managed to transform ecommerce, book reading, and book delivery, and drive innovation around cloud computing, it seems somewhat certain that information technology and journalism might be at the cusp of a massive transformation.
