Any time you go into uncharted waters, there is a desire to latch onto someone to make things more certain. —Frank Biondi Jr., Paramount-Viacom

As the long-standing divisions between the major components of the information industry—computers, consumer electronics, publishing, imaging, telecommunications, and entertainment programming—have begun to blur and fade, players within the industry have engaged in a near frenzy of deal making.

• AT&T makes a $48 billion deal to buy cable giant TCI, after paying $14 billion for Teleport Communications Group, a leading competitive access provider (CAP).

• SBC, after acquiring Pacific Telesis and Southern New England Telephone (SNET), has made a $60 billion offer for fellow Baby Bell Ameritech.

• WorldCom, a leader in growth through acquisition, gobbled up MFS, the leading U.S. CAP (which had bought leading Internet company UUNet), and then bought Brooks Fiber, a CAP serving smaller cities, while simultaneously acquiring networks belonging to AOL and Compuserve. While analysts were still digesting these moves, WorldCom shocked the telecommunications industry by snatching MCI away from BT.

• Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged to create a dominant communications company across the lucrative northeastern corridor. BA then proposed to merge again, this time with the nation's largest independent local carrier, GTE.

• Disney, preparing for world competition, beefed up by acquiring Capital Cities ABC.

These mergers not only represent a belief by corporate titans in the virtues of scale and vertical integration, they also represent wagers on how the industry will evolve. This flurry of activity epitomizes the unsettling transformation of a whole range of industries. When the winds of change are blowing strong, how to trim one's sails is difficult to determine. For companies being buffeted by change of all kinds and from all directions, the pressure to do something is severe. As evidenced by the above, for most companies in information-related businesses, "something" has translated into mergers and strategic alliances.