Bezos built Amazon, the world’s most powerful ecommerce platform, to give people an online alternative to purchasing goods and services in brick and mortar stores. He made Amazon’s cloud computing platform available to other companies so they could free themselves from on-premise datacenter cost and time constraints. And he delivered the Kindle reader so people would have a new way to shop for, download, and read content. Today, for example, you can buy almost any kind of content you want from Amazon with a Kindle – even a subscription to the Washington Post. While Jeff Bezos may have a crystal ball into the next era of content distribution, technology, it seems, will always stay a step ahead of present laws. This will be true as long as rebel entrepreneurs such as Shawn Fanning and visionaries and business titans such as Jeff Bezos push technology to its limits. That’s what Bezos and other tech visionaries do – they push limits and boundaries. Along the way, they create business and legal issues that never existed before because no one could have foreseen the unintended consequences of their inventions. That’s what makes the legal profession a challenge and that’s what makes it fun. So while I can’t predict exactly what Jeff Bezos will do with the Washington Post, I am sure it will be yet another defining moment in the history of this venerable brand. Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

http://www.businessinsider.com/opinion-why-jeff-bezos-bought-the-washington-post-2013-8