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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 mos
by 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 agoLike boo.com
- acdha 8y agoAmazon 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 agoAlthough 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 agoThey 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.