Amazon Taps Its Inner Apple

To explain the present and divine the future, Amazon's founder and prognosticator-in-chief, Jeff Bezos, often turns to the past. Fond of historical analogies, Bezos has compared the dotcom boom and bust to the 1849 gold rush, the advent of electricity to today's broadband-infused Web, the printed book to a horse, and the Kindle reader to a car. Perhaps his trippiest simile likens the impact of the Internet on business to the Cambrian period approximately 550 million years ago, after the first multicellular creatures crawled out of the primordial ooze. That's when we experienced an evolutionary big bang, which engendered both the greatest rate of speciation the world has ever seen and its greatest rate of extinction. "What's very dangerous," Bezos summed up, "is not to evolve."

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