Stand By For the Future

It's coming around in weird and mysterious and exciting ways.

SAN FRANCISCO — Before long, "user-generated content" won't refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meats. This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog — and the repercussions would be earthshaking.

That's the future Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos hopes to set in motion with the company's new direction. If you tease out Bezos' plan, you get to a point where a high school cheerleader sitting at home with a laptop could theoretically harness computing power, design capabilities, manufacturing and distribution from around the world, and make and market a cute little pink hot rod that would compete against General Motors.

How tough can it be to beat General Motors at the car game these days? Anyway, wowzer -bring on the inventory-free global sourcing!