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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 no later than 199

by wahern 8y ago

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 no later 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.

colordrops 8y ago
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.
- wahern 8y ago
  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/ 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.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      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).
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        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. The company itself had a dumb bureaucratic culture. They didn’t take credit cards for years, etc. See: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminating-its-catalogues-and-50000-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminatin... 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.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Windows 95 did have tcp/ip built-in. 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).
- wahern 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
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.
- jrnichols 8y ago
  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. what's old is new again, they say.
  - wahern 8y ago
    Webvan was simply premature. 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.
- ghaff 8y ago
  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.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Sears was selling things that people actually buy however. Clothes, tools, toys, stereo, computers, etc.
- wahern 8y ago
  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.

by wahern 8y ago

colordrops 8y ago

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.

wahern 8y ago
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/ 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.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    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).
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      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. The company itself had a dumb bureaucratic culture. They didn’t take credit cards for years, etc. See: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminating-its-catalogues-and-50000-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminatin... 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.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

Windows 95 did have tcp/ip built-in. 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).

wahern 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

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.

jrnichols 8y ago
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. what's old is new again, they say.
- wahern 8y ago
  Webvan was simply premature. 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.
ghaff 8y ago
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.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Sears was selling things that people actually buy however. Clothes, tools, toys, stereo, computers, etc.
wahern 8y ago
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.