A Fifty-Six Billion Dollar Speculation — and What It Tells Me About the Future of Commerce

Gentlemen, a most extraordinary rumor has reached my desk at Menlo Park, and I confess it has kept me from my filament tests for the better part of an afternoon — a thing I do not permit lightly. The dispatch claims that in the year 2026, a retailer of games — toys, I presume, or perhaps some evolved form of amusement apparatus — has mounted a bid to purchase an entire marketplace of commerce conducted through some manner of electrical network, and the sum involved is fifty-six thousand millions of dollars. Fifty-six billion. I have built power stations, lit entire city districts, fought Westinghouse tooth and nail over alternating current, and the total capitalization of all my enterprises together would scarcely amount to a rounding error in this transaction. The number staggers me. But let me set astonishment aside and think like a man who has spent ten thousand hours in the laboratory. What I find most instructive is not the sum but the method. This GameStop concern reportedly accumulated a five percent ownership stake in its target before announcing its intentions — quietly, strategically, the way I buy up patents before a competitor knows I am interested. That is shrewd. That is the instinct of a man who understands that commerce is warfare conducted with ledger books instead of rifles. I respect the tactic even if I cannot fathom the merchandise. Now, an electrical marketplace — some apparatus by which buyers and sellers conduct trade without meeting face to face, over vast distances, presumably through wires or something yet stranger — that I can almost envision. I have already demonstrated that information can move at the speed of light through copper. If a man can send a stock ticker quotation from New York to Philadelphia in an instant, why not an entire auction? The principle is sound, even if the scale described here beggars belief. What I doubt, however, is the strategic rationale. A toy merchant acquiring a vast bazaar? In my experience, a company succeeds by mastering one thing — the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, the dynamo — and defending that mastery with patents and relentless improvement. Diversification without technical competence is mere speculation, and speculation without sweat is the occupation of bankers, not builders. Still, if this rumor holds even a grain of truth, the future has learned one lesson I have always preached: act before your rivals understand what you are doing, and let the market catch up to your audacity. Thomas A. Edison, Orange, New Jersey, 1890