time man of the year – Jeff Bezos
from the where-did-this-come-from? dept
eric fader writes “Ok so TIME chose to name Bezos man of the year. Hmmm something is fishy here. It would be interesting to see how much TIME has invested either directly, or indirectly in Amazon.com. Of all the people they could have chosen, Bezos would have been my last guess. In reality, Amazon is not doing anything extraordinary, they just were first to market. Amazon is also expanding and spreading themselves way too thin with their newest product line additions.” I have to agree. This one is a bit of a surprise.
Comments on “time man of the year – Jeff Bezos”
Man of the year != Best d00d of the year
Remember that the MotY is meant to be a symbol of the events that, in Time Magazine’s opinion, had the most global impact over the previous year.
I think Time really wanted to give a nod to the concept of electronic commerce as the Big Big Thing of 1999, in their opinion, and I don’t think it’s an invalid one; that this method of business has grown exponentially over the last handful of years speaks a lot about not just the changing landscape of business, but the changing pace of communication and the lifestyles it interlinks (at least in the first world) as well.
Time’s job was to choose a face to represent this phenomenon. For most people, the first brainpop you get when you think about e-commerce is Amazon, regardless of whether you like the company or not, and there, at its head, sits Jeff Bezos. He probably is the most visible single individual in the world of electronic commerce. One would be hard-pressed to find a better human symbol of the industry.