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Vastly superior to this article is this legendary MetaFilter comment on the same topic: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 h

Vastly superior to this article is this legendary MetaFilter comment on the same topic: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

th0ma5 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobush 8y ago
  Like boo.com
- acdha 8y ago
  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).
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    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. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-expanding-beyond-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-exp...
- delecti 8y ago
  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.
colordrops 8y ago
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.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  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.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    The general public had no conception of any of these things.
    - apatters 8y ago
      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.
      - bluGill 8y ago
        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.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
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.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ $3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down? (And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
  - antaviana 8y ago
    10 minutes later, it's $5.77
    - Stratoscope 8y ago
      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.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
batbomb 8y ago
McMaster-Carr is probably a little bit close to the embodiment of something like that
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aportnoy 8y ago
Are you here to see what condition your condition was in?
excalibur 8y ago
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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  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.
- gutnor 8y ago
  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 )
sct202 8y ago
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"
- pgrote 8y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    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.
sytelus 8y ago
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.

th0ma5 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jacobush 8y ago
Like boo.com
acdha 8y ago
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).
- jhbadger 8y ago
  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. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-expanding-beyond-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-exp...
delecti 8y ago
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.

colordrops 8y ago

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.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
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.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  The general public had no conception of any of these things.
  - apatters 8y ago
    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.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      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.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

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.

Stratoscope 8y ago
This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ $3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down? (And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
- antaviana 8y ago
  10 minutes later, it's $5.77
  - Stratoscope 8y ago
    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.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago

batbomb 8y ago

McMaster-Carr is probably a little bit close to the embodiment of something like that

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

aportnoy 8y ago

Are you here to see what condition your condition was in?

excalibur 8y ago

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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
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.
gutnor 8y ago
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 )

sct202 8y ago

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"

pgrote 8y ago
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.
- ghaff 8y ago
  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.

sytelus 8y ago

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.