I guess my favourite example is when we started broadcasting Blue Jay games on the cellphone and no one else in North America was doing it. We were asked, “Why are you the first company in North America doing it?” We said, “Well, if you own the team, the stadium, the broadcaster, and the cellphone company, it's not that hard.” With vertical integration, every stage along the way there are transaction costs. If you can eliminate those transaction costs, you can kick-start that business. Of course, once it's kick-started and customers start to like it, then it takes off. So I do think there's some power to vertical integration.
On November 25th, 2010. See this statement in context.