Fresh from receiving more than $30 million from NBC last week for a stake in his company and its SNAP service, CNET CEO Halsey Minor said he was not surprised by Disney’s decision to take a 43% stake in Infoseek.
Minor brought his rosy predictions about the future of electronic commerce to the PC Expo show in New York Thursday where he gave a midday keynote.
“The big companies want to be in this space,” Minor told an audience. “Disney is responding to the awareness of brand names on the Web. Making the Web more comfortable for consumers.”
Minor said that the urge to aggregate traffic could lead someday to
megamergers that could reduce the number of portal sites further. “One day
you might see, AOL-Yahoo-Infoseek.com,” he said with a smile. “The medium
is the market.”
“Media companies recognize that if they want to continue to grow
they need to enter this space,” he said.
“The net is turning commercial business on its head,” said Minor.
“One day the net will be the place where the entire world comes to shop.”