There’s an interesting piece in AdAge which is a conversation with Bill Gates… Not as Head Honcho at Microsoft, but wearing his other hat as chief of Corbis the digital image archive and stock photo company he founded some years ago. Seattle-based Corbis manages more than 70 million images, many of them icons crucial to the ad biz and media companies. The privately held company (by Gates and family) is not connected to Microsoft, and competes with Getty Images. Apparently Corbis is really starting to go after advertising agencies business. In addition to selling rights to its images, it wants to build its rights management unit, employing a team to negotiate image rights clearance from multiple sources -- celebrities, estates, publishers and major studios. They are betting that the dramatic shift in media usage bodes will be nothing but good for Corbis. “The ad market is certainly not standing still,” Mr. Gates said. “More and more of media consumption is going to be online and digital, and we’re really just at the beginning of that.” All I can say is that if Bill sets his sights on monopolizing a specific business, he usually ends up dominating it.
Just one of the 70 million pictures Bill owns!
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Quantity over quality. That’s the way it’s always been with Microsoft and Apple.
Jobs beat Gates in the content fight because Gates chose mass PC production over creativity.
Selling stock images to agencies isn’t much of an improvement. If he thinks this move competes with the iPod, then he can have at it.
Posted by: makethelogobigger | March 16, 2006 6:09 PM | Permalink to Comment