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I wonder if in a strange way companies like Sears were a victim of the first dotcom bubble crash. If they had pivoted at that point, they’d have been in a bette
by xfour 8y ago
I wonder if in a strange way companies like Sears were a victim of the first dotcom bubble crash. If they had pivoted at that point, they’d have been in a better place. But I could just imagine the executives being in such an “I told you this web thing was a fad” mode that they missed their window to modernize.
Especially since the kind of non amazon places that seem to succeed now carry heavy products and sears had no shortage of that.
- djsumdog 8y agoSears owned Prodigy on-line originally (jointly with IBM). If anything they were above the curve in that regard. But just like Microsoft and their satellite maps (years before Google Earth), they didn't push those technologies in the right direction. IBM and Microsoft are still around (kinda surprisingly, at least for IBM, when you think about how old the company really is. I mean they sold punch cards to the Nazis). Sears was literally the Amazon of the 1900s. Everything could be bought from their catalogues and they pushed those catalogues harder than Tigers Direct. It shows that no matter how big you are, other similar companies can easily go the same way. I wonder if Amazon, Facebook and Google will still be as big when I retire, or if they'll be in a decline or dead.
- orev 8y agoSuccessful companies are largely victims of their own success. They got to where they are by doing things a certain way, so it becomes very risky to change that approach, even when the ground is shifting under them. The internal structures that worked for one model don’t work in the new one, and yet they are calcified due to management structures and worker skill sets. History has shown time and again that these companies just can’t pivot the way they need to.