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And how is this relevant for the regular shoe shop or clothing boutique in a Dutch city in the mid-nineties? Real pressure on sales volume is still 15 years awa

And how is this relevant for the regular shoe shop or clothing boutique in a Dutch city in the mid-nineties? Real pressure on sales volume is still 15 years away. Not a timeline which is actionable for the smaller retailer. Also, plenty of retailers did migrate to hybrid or online only. But your 'mid-nineties writing on the wall' is just irrelevant hindsight.

jacquesm 5y ago
To you, maybe. Mid 90's my buddies were the founders of xs4all, I ran my world wide webcam community (oh no, a founder ;) ) and we were all coming up with 20 ideas per day on how we could use this thing. There quite literally wasn't time enough to implement everything we thought of. A friend famously wrote up a bit about how the browser would one day be the UI to everything. Another sketched a complete vision of youtube but we were to busy to be bothered... Even I was skeptical about some of the more outlandish stuff and it all came true, and then some. We had live video in the browser in 1995. Yes, it's hindsight, but it couldn't be anything else because time has passed. But there were lots of people with actual foresight back then and all you had to do was listen to them to see where the future would go, it was as inevitable as the tides. Even the .com bust was more of a temporary setback (and the implosion of many bubbles that urgently needed imploding) than a real problem. The point is, and we can bicker about the timing but I don't think that is all too relevant here: there were plenty of indicators that brick & mortar stores would sooner or later have competition. Minitel in France was a pretty strong vision of what the future could be like and it had a ton of online services, including ordering goods (and pizzas). Sure, it needed time to gather steam. But the expression 'the writing was on the wall' applies: if you wanted to see it, you could have. The problem with most business owners that are on to some kind of success is that they forget that everything has a beginning and an end, this goes for buggy whip makers just as much as it does for buggy whip store owners, if the automobile didn't get you then internet would have and if the internet had come along a little later then the pandemic would have. But somewhere in the 90's savvy business owners saw the shift and prepared. They're the ones doing very well today. The ones that decided to fight a rearguard action against the inevitable: not so much.

jacquesm 5y ago

To you, maybe. Mid 90's my buddies were the founders of xs4all, I ran my world wide webcam community (oh no, a founder ;) ) and we were all coming up with 20 ideas per day on how we could use this thing. There quite literally wasn't time enough to implement everything we thought of. A friend famously wrote up a bit about how the browser would one day be the UI to everything. Another sketched a complete vision of youtube but we were to busy to be bothered... Even I was skeptical about some of the more outlandish stuff and it all came true, and then some. We had live video in the browser in 1995. Yes, it's hindsight, but it couldn't be anything else because time has passed. But there were lots of people with actual foresight back then and all you had to do was listen to them to see where the future would go, it was as inevitable as the tides. Even the .com bust was more of a temporary setback (and the implosion of many bubbles that urgently needed imploding) than a real problem. The point is, and we can bicker about the timing but I don't think that is all too relevant here: there were plenty of indicators that brick & mortar stores would sooner or later have competition. Minitel in France was a pretty strong vision of what the future could be like and it had a ton of online services, including ordering goods (and pizzas). Sure, it needed time to gather steam. But the expression 'the writing was on the wall' applies: if you wanted to see it, you could have. The problem with most business owners that are on to some kind of success is that they forget that everything has a beginning and an end, this goes for buggy whip makers just as much as it does for buggy whip store owners, if the automobile didn't get you then internet would have and if the internet had come along a little later then the pandemic would have. But somewhere in the 90's savvy business owners saw the shift and prepared. They're the ones doing very well today. The ones that decided to fight a rearguard action against the inevitable: not so much.