A little further down in that thread there's a link to an article about Sears mail order homes. I live in a century old neighbourhood and there's a couple dozen Sears homes within a 3 block radius of me. They're still standing, still lived in, still looking good. They were built to last.
I live in one of the Sears catalog homes. Still haven't figured out exactly which one, as it has had some additions and changes made in the intervening years (its a 1927). Seems well enough built. Except for the electrical - knob and tube is a crazy way to do it.
It's what they had at the time. My knob and tube was installed by someone very skeptical of electricity. So they ran the hot and the neutral about two feet from each other. They only come together at the outlets and the fuse panel.
Pretty wild that the quoted example of a racist caricature is still a product on store shelves. To be honest, I'm surprised I haven't heard of any protests or boycotts of Quaker Oats due to this.
I read the thread in its entirety before commenting. Access to and ability to afford goods and services is what defines one's standard of living. Not having to deal with racist policies gave blacks access to a standard of living they otherwise couldn't attain. Instead of having to pay whatever some goods cost plus a lot of their time Sears let them buy those goods for the cost and a minimal amount of time allowing them to spend the time elsewhere.
There's an obvious (or at least I thought so) modern parallel with poor people and cheap imported consumer goods. An increased standard of living encompasses a wider variety of improvements than just moving to a town with a Whole Foods and some breweries.
If Amazon buys Sears it will be a mind-boggling Inception of Amazon's present history predicting its own past's future. What, OMG?!
I can actually see this happening. Sears locations might make pretty decent mini-DCs/Echo sales centers. Ironically, I feel like they could turn Sears into Borders and do OK. A mini DC center in the back- this could allow for 2 hour deliveries to more suburnban/rural locations. In the front they could have shelves of Kindle files printed out on paper. I know, it sounds like Ye Olde Book Store, but here an Echo thingy would replace the Dewey Decimal or human employee. Alexa would manifest as a racially and gender ambiguous animatron who would not only answer your questions but also serve free Kombucha when you pick up your prescriptions or sign up for a checking account (cash converts to Amazon credits).
I can see Amazon making them mini-malls within existing malls until the already struglling other stores can't exist anymore. Once Amazon has the entire mall- well that is when things get crazy!
I have been inaccurately predicting this for a few years (with a variety of big box stores/ many location stores).
I think what I was most wrong about is AMZN thinks a lot about the geographic overlap of their customers and where they will shop. That is why the Whole Foods purchase was so brilliant. Both the overlap of wallets shopping in at both AMZN (prime) and WF.
I wonder how well Sear's store footprint fits with the AMZN customer base.
With wealth and income gap divide, there not much room to bet big on the non-rich part of town. Find the Whole Foods and and Apple Store and Nordstroms and that's the mall or shopping area that will support higher profit margins.
Amazon feels like a a regular store to me. I find things that I would expect. Alibaba always feels like Amazon with no rules, and it is awesome. If a vendor wants to sell a house they can, and if a consumer wants a kit house they can just contact them. I think the marketplace feel makes it a lot more interesting.
Wow! Didn't know that was something you could order off a place like Alibaba! Side note, but does anyone have experience of using a kit house like this? Anywhere I could go to find further discussion on these?
Still not the biggest such blunder, even in the late 20th century. That dubious honor must go to Xerox. They created a research org (Palo Alto Research Center or PARC) and tasked it with pushing the state of the art in the industry, which it did. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG editors and desktop publishing, bitmapped graphics, the smalltalk language, the MVC design pattern, and more, all in the late 1970s. Xerox corporate leadership looked at this stuff (especially the ALTO computer which represented the culmination of most of these innovations) and couldn't see a future in it, so they shit-canned it. A few years later other companies (specifically Apple and Microsoft) toured Xerox PARC and learned a great deal about these things then repackaged it in their own forms (the Macintosh and Windows). Meanwhile, some PARC employees quit and spun out their own startups using the technology (3COM and Adobe).
Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.) were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the roadside because they were too myopic.
And remember, of course, that those executives were being paid millions of dollar for their alleged "sharp business sense" and "superior decision-making" abilities. Goes to show. In my country the recipient of several international "CEO of the year" awards sunk the public telecom company in less than 2 years. And so on.
This point can't be stressed enough, for the benefit of those who still believe we left aristocracy behind. CEO pay is bound by the rules of neither a free market nor a meritocracy (except in the original sarcastic sense of that word). Ditto for the rentiers on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. The fact that a few peasants get to join the aristocracy every year doesn't change what it is.
It still seems very hard to shake the myth of meritocracy when wealth and connections are shown to have greater impact than latent talent, but here's some more ammunition for that argument. It's not that graduating from a prestigious school is without merit, but simply even getting the chance to do so likely means, in most cases, that one's starting conditions were more favorable. At the very least, privilege means being allowed to make mistakes and recover from them that would end someone else's aspirations.
One thing I've discovered as I've grown older is just how much the concept that business is about money is bullshit. That's a theory about business and it doesn't describe reality very well. Business is much more about power and ego than it is about money. You see this with small businesses most directly. Lots of small businesses fail because they don't do the obvious thing to maximize revenue and profits and to stay in business, instead they do things that only make sense in the context of the owner's ego and sense of power.
eh? CEO pay is bound by the same thing that everyone else pay is - the market rate. As are wall street salaries (which, again, are absolutely market based).
Now - you can argue much more effectively that CEO hiring is not very objective, that comp seems to be decoupled from long term performance, and I'll freely grant that Finance doesn't add the societal value equivalent to its slice of the pie. None of these things should be conflated with the continued existence of aristocracy
CEO pay is bound by the same thing that everyone else pay is - the market rate.
Okay, there's a market rate. Why is that rate so high? I'm sure we all thought "hell, I could have run HP into the ground for half what they paid Fiorina." Yeah, except you and I aren't in the "potential CEO" club. That club is determined by wealth, birth, and connections, not what the market will bear.
"Market rate" is not sacred. There's a ratchet effect here: the potential upside for both the CEO and the people who decide on CEO hiring is extremely large, while the downside for both parties is artificially limited by corporate structures and liability law. Worst case for them is that the CEO parachutes to another company, and the other rentiers take a slight loss quickly made up by their other bets. "Market rate" means nothing when the market is so severely distorted, and the viability of the free market itself depends on removing such distortions.
As for aristocracy, where else do you think this ratchet effect leads? It leads directly to a level of inter-generational wealth disparity that is functionally indistinguishable from explicit hereditary peerage.
I mean the people paying for CEOs, whoever they are, are the ones with a willingness to pay some amount, and that amount is the upper limit for CEO payment.
IMHO, this shows why you cannot judge creativity only through the free market (i.e. measure the creative output).
Because at the time when new a thing is being created, only the creator (if even) understands the purpose of it. So any other external actor who is supposed to measure the output (be it company CEO, or grant commission, etc.) is not equipped to understand why. Were they equipped to understand, they would just commission the work in the first place.
IMHO it's possible they actually did realize how ground breaking it was, but it's an example of big companies being structurally incapable of investing in the technology that will ultimately disrupt their core business.
I don't think it's a coincidence that pretty much the exact same thing happened to Kodak:
This is also why I call bullshit on the concept that "good ideas don't matter" in business. Execution is important, but good ideas can be just as valuable. But the problem with innovative ideas is that they can be difficult to communicate. My favorite example of this is the adaptation of novels into feature films. It's usually the norm rather than the exception for a truly excellent novel to be adapted into a truly mediocre film which not only misses the mark of the book but also just doesn't seem to "get" the book at a fundamental level (e.g. themes, characters, etc.) And here you have a case where an "idea" (the entire novel itself) is fleshed out into a work containing tens of thousands of words, replete with scads of detail all over the place. And you also have proof that thousands if not millions of people are able to learn this "idea" and "get it". Yet that system of communicating an idea is still so fraught with the potential for error that it cannot reliably result in a feature film that even expresses the themes of the book with any semblance of authenticity. Because communication is hard, especially when innovative and novel ideas are involved.
And this is true in business just as it is in art. You can have a fantastic "good idea", one that is worth billions even if it is executed with only mediocre success. But that doesn't mean you could simply hand that good idea over to someone else and they would succeed with it to the same degree, because there is a very high chance that they just won't "get it". They'll hear the idea and think that you meant something else. Or they'll think some inconsequential aspect of it is the important part while ignoring the truly important part, and so on.
And we see many examples of this in history. We see XEROX looking at a nearly fully executed "good idea" in the form of the Alto and concentrating on temporary, less consequential aspects of it such as the high unit cost of the first generation computers and not seeing the enormous potential (a computer that was so easy to use anybody could use it, and a computer that was so useful that anybody could benefit from having one).
Good idea doesn't matter because good ideas are rarely exclusive. If one has a good idea, there is a good chance someone else has also came up the same idea. Thus how to execute that idea becomes critical, including access to capital, talent, market, etc. Amazon was certainly not the first to come up with e-commerce
There are always exception on both ends of the spectrum of course.
Your novel adaption analogy isn't exactly apt. You can't test a movie the way you can with business iteration. There are also no metrics to measure a movie's success the way you can measure revenue, customer retention, user usages, etc.
The contrast between what Xerox was doing at PARC versus what they sold to the public was astounding. While they were inventing the future at PARC, the system they were selling was the 820, a me-too Z80 CP/M system that was released just as the world was going to 16-bit systems.
It may be worth considering that Apple’s first take on the Xerox ideas was the Lisa, not exactly a big sales success. It took two rounds of refining the PARC ideas (Lisa, then Mac) to come to a somewhat-viable product. The Mac was still very expensive and didn’t sell that well for years.
Xerox could have tried to productize the Star for the mass market but it doesn’t seem like a wild claim to say they would have failed and we’d still have waited for the Amiga.
Regional pricing isn't new, nor introduced by Amazon - international companies have worked this way for ages: maximise profit by doing different pricing in different markets for the same product.
A prime example of regional pricing was, of course, the region code system for DVD movies. And the modern incarnation of this is regional pricing for streaming services such as Netflix, along with trying to stop people from accessing services via VPNs.
It probably is a regional variation as I was checking from Spain and it is $5.77 now.
BTW, I find it is a huge percent variation. Not sure if it is the outcome of some ML to optimize revenue or some other external (legal or author bound) reason.
That's odd, it still shows $3.03 for me, even in an incognito window on mobile and desktop, and on a machine that has never been signed into my Amazon account.
I'm not convinced this would've worked. It would've been too early. 56k modems were cutting edge then and you still needed a desktop. Amazon sold only books mostly for quite some time around then. Also, there was a lot of hype around the net and "www" was pretty awkward to get people to wrap their heads around. It would've been a lot of money about 10 years too early.
Amazon was still profitable after the first couple of years even with those limits, and people were racing to get online — decidedly not just geeks.
It wouldn’t have converted the catalog business overnight but Sears was really well positioned, especially with local stores to handle returns and service. If they’d invested then, they’d have been prepared as broadband started to appear (for timing, I went from 56k dialup to 10Mb cable in 1998).
Although people forget that the conversion of Amazon to an "everything store" was later -- 1998/1999. For the first four years of its existence it was just a book store. The "everything store" phase was in the early cable modem era.
They already had the catalog though, and the related infrastructure, and the name recognition of both. "It's the catalog but on your computer" would have been easy enough for people to understand.
As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Up until deep into the 21st century were people finally convinced that online retail made sense. Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.
There were some good and bad reasons for this. Remember that when the web launched the idea of encryption, PCI compliance, input sanitization, etc. was all pretty foreign. Your typical web store was vulnerable to a remote execution vulnerability, probably stored all its data (including passwords and credit card numbers) in flat files (unencrypted plain-text) without even using a database (which at least meant it wasn't vulnerable to SQL injection), and didn't use ssl. It took a few years for things to improve to a basic level of security but even then the widespread public perception was that giving your credit card to "the internet" was about one million times worse than walking through a dark alley in the worst part of town while carrying a basket full of all your life savings in cash.
Bit by bit things started to change, but it took years.
SSL 3.0 came out in 1996. The entire reason for SSL was to pave the way for online retail and credit card purchases. Everybody understood that nolater than 1996. (But earlier considering SSL 2.0 was published 1995.)
Gates famously underestimated the web, but Windows 95[1] came with a TCP/IP stack out-of-the-box. That was a rapid and significant about face.
While much was unknown in 1993 (Netscape wasn't until 1994), nobody should get a pass for shutting down the Sears Catalog with such potential possibly on the horizon. Especially executives making many millions of dollars for their business acumen. Sears decided to jettison their initiatives at the very moment Wal-Mart overtook them, beating them at their own game. I realize they felt burned by Prodigy, but committing to their existing model was the one and only thing that could ensure their ultimate demise, and that's the path they deliberately took. They stupidly decided to try to regain leadership by racing Wal-Mart to the bottom.
[1] Or perhaps an immediate succeeding bug fix release? I can't remember as I had gone from Windows 3.11 to Linux but I feel like the original Windows 95 lacked a stack.
Is everybody forgetting the dot-com crash in early 2000s? Plenty of companies bet big on the web and lost everything. Nobody knew what they were doing, or how to make money, online. A lot of ideas that sound good and commonplace today were tried and failed dramatically at that time.
Exactly. I remember the spectacular failures of pets.com and webvan.com (they blew through.. what, $600,000,000 in less than a year?) and now we have chewy.com and a bunch of other grocery delivery services.
Pets.com is the better example. It was a failure because the market and economics for speciality stores isn't any better with electronic storefronts than with brick & mortar--most people want one-stop shopping most of the time, online or offline. But Sears never tried to go down that route.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the big idea that lost in the crash in retrospect seemed to be that the Internet could make highly specialized, niche commerce profitable and scalable. It didn't. Amazon succeeded by expanding its offerings, not by sticking to books and CDs. All the big success stories either had large retail selections (eBay) or offered specialized technical services (PayPal, Google) that enabled or leveraged the Internet as a green field for traditional commercial activity.
These paths to success were right up Sears alley. Yes, they tried and failed with Prodigy. But surely the entrepreneurs on HN understand that failure is often a matter of timing, not of value or market potential. Sears' leadership could have stepped back and asked whether their attempts with electronic retail were a matter of timing or just a hopeless flop. It appears they did neither and simply executed the 1980s-1990s playbook: "focus" on your core business and return everything else to shareholders, who theoretically are better able to allocate funds to experimental ventures. The problem with that economic theory is that it ignores or discounts the value of good will and the intrinsic value of the firm, both of which Sears exemplified, and it neglects the duty owed to the firm as an ongoing concern. Rather than play to win they decided to not play at all. In 1993 such defeatism was hardly justified given their otherwise strong (if declining) market position.
I think even a lot of people who were adults at the time have trouble appreciating just how different things were just 20 years ago. There were no smart phones. Online shopping was very new; I think my first Amazon order was only in 1997 or so. A lot of people were still skeptical about a credit card for mail order catalogs for that matter. Email was still far from universal. Etc.
If Bill gates didn't get it, how would an executive from a brick and mortar get it. Unlike today, the types that created SSL had little to no overlap with traditional MBA types.
Sears had Prodigy, so they had the resources to understand the technology and potential going forward. Here's an interesting Wire article from 1993: https://www.wired.com/1993/06/prodigy/
Long story short, their attempt to push online shopping on Prodigy was proving a failure. That kind of cuts both ways because that shows they did understand the technological potential. Also, by 1993 it was becoming clear to many people that web advertising was going to be huge. (I remember wanting to get into BBS advertising at that time, before I realized the Internet existed, coincidentally about a year or two before Link Exchange was invented.) The Sears Catalog was first and foremost an advertising platform. Like AOL, Prodigy failed because it was a walled garden. But I don't think walled gardens were ever considered greats platforms for advertising to the exclusion of wider potential markets. So Sears could have realized the fatal flaw in Prodigy and the future potential on the web for advertising, if not for shopping.
I'd disagree. Prodigy was always GUI based and pioneered the banner ad, and provided a good template for how online shopping would work. IMO the problem was that the scale wasn't there, shipping sucked and computers weren't prevalent. This was the era of the $5,000 PC.
The other problem was that the venture partners were big old companies getting wrecked by modern management. You IBM, who was on the verge of its first big implosion and Sears, who didn't understand the value of the catalog.
The old walled gardens withered, time will tell if the Google/Facebook/etc of today devolve into AOL/Prodigy 30 years later.
Except for an almost vanishingly small number of users, everything was more or less a walled garden at the time including your local BBS system.
My recollection of Prodigy was that it focused on a GUI when screen resolution and connection speeds weren't really up to it. It tried to be a more mass market commercial system but neither the technology infrastructure nor the user base were really there.
It's a tempting narrative to focus on Sears' failure because of their catalog. But, truth be told, the Sears catalog hadn't been a thing for the vast majority of Americans for decades. In the mid-nineties Sears was mostly an appliance and hardware store (with a bit of an identity crisis) at a time when the big box home improvement and discount stores were starting to get big.
It's somewhat fair to say that Sears could have been Amazon while taking advantage of their retail footprint. But I'm not sure that Sears was special in this regard compared to any other of the big retail chains (none of which were oriented toward the way Amazon entered the market with books and then digital media).
My family had a shared summer home in an area with almost no stores save for the Sears Catalog store, so I was someone exposed to it more than was typical in the 80s.
But they built a last mile infrastructure that was amazing for the time and didn’t exist until Amazon prime. They also had a small parts distribution capabilty for repairs.
To me it’s always been a interesting “what could have been”, but also an example of how much more efficient and effective a modern enterprise like Amazon is.
A major problem with Prodigy was that it didn't transition well to the Windows 3.1/95 ecosystem.
Their custom graphics were a good plan for making use of a 2400bps connection, but they screamed EGA. I suspect they had to develop a lot of GUI features from scratch.
The result was that the Prodigy package looked like running a DOS package in a window, while AOL looked and felt like a native package.
I also suspect it did them no benefits that you got an assigned and largely illegible email address by default-- you didn't see people clinging to their XXXX22X@prodigy.net addresses the way they kept their CutesyName69@aol.com ones.
On the one hand I want to say that anyone who didn't bet on the internet early when they had the chance was kind of a dummy. After all it was the era of exponential growth of all things related to computers. Prior to the internet video games, personal computers, and mainframes had seen exponential rises to outlandish levels of success. And with both video games and PCs there were countless stories of scrappy little startups of a handful of people beginning work out of a garage or some-such going on to become wildly successful in new business areas that had been invented only recently.
On the other hand, the internet was just too different and too impenetrable for a lot of people to understand its potential at the time. In the '80s and early '90s it was primarily used by academics and scientists. It seemed very wonkish and very nerdy, not the sort of thing that would appeal to the public at large. And even as the web grew exponentially throughout the '90s it still took many, many years for that perception to shift.
At the same time, people who were sufficiently clueless that they couldn't tell for themselves what was going to happen with the internet quite easily bought into all sorts of fantastical alternative narratives. At the exact same time that Amazon.com was banging out book orders in a small Seattle garage other people were fantasizing about shopping in virtual malls made possible by VRML. Or, on the other end, there were folks thinking that slapping up some PDFs and an "order form" (that you printed out and mailed in or maybe just manually typed in all the descriptions and product codes of all the stuff you wanted) was a perfectly adequate sort of online store experience in a time that was just spitting distance from the 21st century (though even today some stores like that still exist). The clueless were so clueless they couldn't tell fantasy from reality, and had no hope of making correct decisions.
And then a few years later when dot-coms truly took off things got worse not better. People finally saw the business potential in the internet, but now there was so much dumb money flowing into the industry that the easiest way to get huge piles of cash investments was to have the most ridiculous idea imaginable as long as it had a small chance of becoming enormously popular. By that point the only people who were going to survive were those who had extensive first hand experience with the internet, understood what it was about, understood it's limitations as well as advantages, and were capable of being ruthlessly pragmatic in their attempts to exploit those advantages (as amazon was, as google was).
There are two doors. The door on the left leads to certain death. The door on the right leads to something unknown. Which door would you take?
Nobody can predict what the next market disruption will look like, although you can predict in broad strokes. But Sears had already been beaten by Wal-Mart by 1993. Cutting the catalog, moving to the suburbs, and several other moves were part of a de-risking and divestiture strategy intended to return money to shareholders.
At best it was, in retrospect, an admission of defeat. At worst it was horribly short-sighted. Either way it was bad leadership that squandered good will (and thus real value), and executives making millions shouldn't get a pass if only to make it clear what we expect of today's leaders.
If you want to cut your losses and dump all your money into Vanguard market funds, don't tell everybody you've discovered some great new investment strategy just so you can earn your bonuses over the next few quarters. That's what Sears did. If Sears wanted to unwind and die with dignity, there were much smarter ways to go about it that didn't hasten the destruction of shareholder value while raiding pensions. (And that's before Lampert.)
EDIT: OTOH, perhaps lying about your divestiture strategy is what you have to do to prevent a crash in price. Are there any MBAs or finance guys here who could chime in about potential strategies? Anyhow, it's just not cool =) It was Sears!
Maybe not, but there was certainly a trust issue. At the dawn of ecommerce many people were afraid of using their credit card online -- they didn't know the technical details but it just seemed new and scary.
Which should have given sears extra help: they were a known and trusted entity that you could give your credit card to unlike that tiny fly-by-night startup bookstore Amazon.
They had everything needed to take advantage of the internet just a few years before: a trusted name, a large catalog, experience in online sales (progigy might have failed, but the experience would have been a big help), and a large distribution network.
I agree.
After observing a few generations of these businesses you realize that their shareholders prioritize large, gradually declining revenue streams over new opportunities.
That's totally fine and that's why the system needs to be very friendly to new business creation. We don't need Sears to innovate at a time when its shareholders want to retire. We need to give new innovators the space to do their thing.
Yes the internet was the key. Everyone has been taking advantage of new technology to sell products since the dawn of commerce. What made Amazon great was an understanding of how the internet could be exploited.
> Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.
Ironic was the movie "The Net" in 1995 with Sandra Bullock. The opening scene of her ordering pizza online was such a leap of faith for people at the time. The other interesting thing is how the movie basically predicted where we are now with all of our personal information online.
Nice point. I recall vividly going to see The Net with a bunch of other CS students and we all laughed at the absurdity of it all. "Animation and sound on a web page? You've got to be kidding!" Sometimes you are too close to something to see the trend.
> The opening scene of her ordering pizza online was such a leap of faith for people at the time.
In 1994, when the Internet was opening to commercial use, someone gave a demo at my university of a pizza ordering system. I thought to myself it would never work, because all the stores would need to be wired up, and how was that going to happen?
I've been wrong about technology far, far more often than not.
The stores wouldn't even need to be wired up to the Internet. All they would need is a call center to dispatch pizza orders to the stores or a fax machine if they wanted to dispatch orders without a voice call, both mature, widely deployed tech at the time.
Yep, I later realized that flaw in my skepticism. In fact I had done some delivery from a store that used a call center, so it should have been obvious.
It's worth noting that Amazon's selection is orders of magnitude larger than Sears' ever was. This isn't solely or even primarily because there are more products available today, nor is it an accident. Sears (and pretty much every other retailer in the '90s) always offered a curated selection of products. If you went to them looking for a fedora, you'd have maybe four or five different options to choose from. A quick search on Amazon returns over 3,000 results (when limited to the "men's fashion" department). Instead of building a select portfolio of products, Amazon's model is to sell as many different items as they possibly can (with a few strategic omissions).
There's an important paradigm shift here that needs to be considered. The idea of going to one place (what's a website again?) to find every variation ever made of every item you can possibly think of was completely foreign to people in 1993. In a nutshell, you can't GET to Amazon without going through Ebay.
So what would have happened had Sears' tried-and-true curation model come to dominate online shopping early on? It's hard to say obviously, but it still would have been ripe for disruption, from people who saw the online marketplace a bit differently.
I actually prefer Sears model. At least there was some minimum of quality I could expect. In addition, I could be fairly certain that I would not get a counterfeit. This is one of the reasons I loce shopping at Costco, good quality, good prices, excellent service.
Indeed you are right, that's what people kept talking about when Amazon started to rise in popularity: long tail sales strategy.
They had everything that you simply couldn't get anywhere else, a strategy that only an online shop could manage. Borders and other big chain had a similar-ish strategy, however they were hampered by their physical shops: they are forced to curate to fit floor space and, for a customer, delivery is not a positive outcome of going to a physical shop, so it does not matter how fast you can get something if it takes longer than the customer is willing to stay in the shop.
Amazon has continued to refine its online shop, but the key was to always offer as much as possible, even offering themselves as a platform to independent seller in order to vastly increase their catalogue. ( I have done business with amazon sellers that had sold only a handful of time per year, for a perishable product - that's ultra long tail )
Prodigy (IBM-Sears JV) did have a storefront, but I don't think anyone actually used it. I think even with a good idea, most large companies aren't really the best place to launch new novel ideas--even when they're good ones.
EDIT: I found an article from 1990 that says that you could buy things on Prodigy from Sears and JC Penny. You could also order groceries (it sounds really clunky though). It's under "Grocery shopping heads for home at Dominick's
Jouzaitis, Carol Chicago Tribune (1963-Current file); Sep 7, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune"
We used the Prodigy grocery delivery service many times when it came out. It was clunky, but a great service. Within 6 months the delivery service stopped. It wasn't until 2017 our local grocery stores began offering delivery again. Amazing to think about that disconnect.
A huge amount of money was lost in online grocery delivery in the dot-com crash which probably scared off most new entrants for a long time. I've had Peapod available for over 10 years but I think that's still the only option I have 40 miles outside of a major metro in the US.
Very good read! I often get amazed when CEOs shutdown products left and right to "improve the focus". This was in fact classic Jobs advice all the time that has gone bad in many instances. It's even more mind boggling when CEOs decide to sell their businesses. IBM selling entire PC lineup to Lenovo is classic example.
Sure, they could make some colossal mistakes and get in a huge amount of debt, or some new competitor could come into cloud computing in a way we can't predict and Amazon can't compete with. The future is weird and things that seem like they will last forever can quickly vanish, and afterwards it seems inevitable.
As a whole? Probably not. As an online merchant. It's unlikely but possible.
The HN crowd and its ilk have been complaining about quality control for a while. Electronic components and labor for assembly are getting cheaper by the year. Grab a popular electronic item's circuit diagram (say Bluetooth earbuds), spend a few hundred reproducing the form factor of a popular major manufacturer, volume manufacture in China, and sell! Better yet, brand yours as a competitors (or however that works) and reap the profits as your cheap knockoff gets sold as the most popular item in that category. It's gotten so ridiculous that even my non-tech peers are starting to steer away from Amazon for certain purchases. I've even seen claims that there are fake/counterfeit diapers masquerading as ubiquitous brands.
But it's not just limited to counterfeit goods. The quality in general of certain products (usually electronics) is abysmal. I don't fault Amazon for this - you can find cheap electronics in big box stores that will break just as quickly as an something on Amazon. Brick and mortar stores had shelf space on their side.
If you go to a big box store for wireless earbuds, you'll likely see Beats, Samsung, Apple, Bose, etc. taking up most of the shelf space. If you do a search on Amazon for wireless earbuds, the first page (for me) has 15 organic results, and Apple is the only brand that I recognize. Again - not inherently bad, but I'm hard pressed to believe that even with hundreds to thousands of reviews per item, you're buying a quality product that will last for more than a year of regular use. I've bought a popular set of earbuds before based on Amazon's search. The first pair lasted 3 months. I got a second pair under warranty, and it died in the same manner after 3 months.
Amazon is a titan in this space. It would take a lot of neglect for their retail side to outright fail. But if they don't fix their quality issues with their supply, they're going to start trending in the wrong direction.
Maybe it's inevitable, but who cares...SEARS milked it for 130+ years. That's about 4-5 generations. But I tell you, no one is going to allow AMZN control 50++% of online sales for decades to come.
I've wondering why that's been true for 10 years and yet noone's even close. Cuz if they were waiting for AMZN to make a big mistake, they waited too long.
It's odd to me to find this comment downvoted, nearly completely grayed out for applying the lessons of history of antiquity to the modernity of [e]commerce, after just reading quite a few others making the exact same statements only with more recent participants and industry juggernauts.
It is a transparent attempt to inject a political discussion into a topic where it is not appropriate. Your use of ad hominem in supporting this is just as transparent. There are other places where this discussion would be appropriate.
I am TRULY sorry to put this burden out there but someone explain to me the "transparently political" here because it's either too early in the morning or I am just not seeing it in that comment for some other reason.
Am I somehow out of line here for reading that comment as an allegory for what's happening with Amazon, as it happened with Sears, as it happened with many other institutional market players with enormous market power going back several hundreds of years? Is it wrong to ask if that loop is repeating itself now with Amazon and other giants of commerce in 2018? Because that's what I got from that commentary. It's an interesting thought experiment and I'm happy to oblige that.
Playing a game of knee-jerk word association just to torpedo the commentary as ad-hoc political, yes, in my opinion signals some lack of appreciation for history. If you want to call that ad hominem that's fine, but I'm not taking it back.
https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993