Who was the big winner at the box office this weekend? It was Sony (NYSE: SNE) and its 21 movie starring Kevin Spacey. According to early estimates at Boxofficemojo, the film took in over $23 million in its first three days of release. Looks like the market is finally getting at least a little tired of News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! -- it fell to second place, raking in about $17 million, enough to put it beyond the coveted -- although not so impressive anymore -- $100 million mark.

Here, though, is the big surprise of the weekend from where I'm sitting -- maybe I'm not with it or something, but I thought that Superhero Movie was going to dominate. It was released by MGM and Dimension. How in the world could this have missed? It came in third with a horrible estimate of $9.5 million -- let's hope that number gets revised upward, because a gross of less than $10 million for a movie that should have been popular to the Scary Movie generation is pretty embarrassing. It seemed to have an effective marketing campaign, though; the commercials described what looked like a fun time at the multiplex, bringing home the fact that the spoof of films such as Spider-Man and X-men probably contained quite a few bellylaugh moments. Guess the timing just wasn't there for it.

After reading the current cover of BusinessWeek, which features Amazon.com, I want to follow-up this piece from last week and delve a little more into the vision Jeff Bezos has for Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Amazon CEO Bezos (who in this man's opinion strikes an uncanny resemblance to actor Kevin Spacey) has often been misunderstood by the marketplace. After all, he guided the company through the dot-com mess five years ago and the company became profitable after years of waiting almost to the quarter which Bezos predicted. Can he see the future?

Soon Amazon will be selling computer power and storage services as commodities for small businesses, in addition to its gargantuan online retail operation that is the largest in the world. While Amazon is in the business of "managing complexity," just how far can this company stretch itself as it sells almost everything under the sun while providing logistics infrastructure for other business enterprises?

Perhaps Bezos is creating the next competitor for his own company. He doesn't seem to care, as if to say "bring it on." There's a madman at work here, but he's got an impressive track record, unlike many analysts, and of course the world will be watching. Amazon, in my opinion, is trying to become as ubiquitous as Google, but in its own way. We'll see if it gets there.

(Disclosure: I own AMZN shares as of 11-6-06)