8 ms·

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis o

by roomey 3y ago

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s. Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets. Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way

mach1ne 3y ago
It was laughed at by consumers. There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers.
- crimsontech 3y ago
  Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. Early online shopping was a big gamble with different stores having different rules. It was often a frustrating experience. Distance selling regulations helped with it a lot. I can buy a product online and if I'm not happy with it, for any reason, I can send it back for a refund. This just isn't the case with shopping in a store. I learned this the hard way twice buying in store from Argos in the UK, only to get home and find I had bought a used product which someone else had returned already. Argos refused to refund or replace the items because they are used. I looked this up at the time and it seemed to be a common occurrence, I can only assume people returned items they bought online and Argos just put them back on the shelves. Had I bought it online and had it delivered to my house I could have returned it. I buy online wherever possible now. Interestingly "click-and-collect" services are not covered by distance selling regulations which is how I got burned twice by Argos.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    > Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. This is why I still buy clothes, shoes and sport gears at stores. Returning products takes time and you still don't have what you wanted to buy. If I buy a new item of the very same model I bought before, that's OK to buy online. Unfortunately companies keep changing models every year.
    - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
      What brands are you buying from that change models every year??
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Pretty much every clothing brand out there, and usually more often than once a year. Also at this point they don't give a damn about quality controls. E.g. there was a time when you could order shoes online rather reliably. Today? What you get in the mail is barely correlated with the size you specified on the order. From the last 10 days: we order two pairs for our kids, size X and Y - which we selected by actually following measurement instructions of the shoe company. When the order comes, it it turns out size X is too big for the younger kid, size Y is too small for the older. We return those, and order again, this time sizes (X-1) and (Y+1). What we got is... the (X-1) shoes were identical to X shoes (therefore still too large); the (Y+1) shoes were like Y+3 - way overshooting the target. This was same models, same company, with no logistical confusion according to labels. Just one of multiple similar events we had (and many more I heard about from others) where the size of shoes received was pretty much random. So this is one category of goods that we're going back to buying in person. And yes, that means dragging a 1.5 y.o. and a 4 y.o. into a shoe store in a large mall - the very one I mentioned above. Yes, our kids will likely get overwhelmed by lights and wares and ads, and start making all kinds of scenes. I don't care. If the store doesn't want a scene, they should not be routinely fucking up their order sizes.
        ZephyrBlu 3y ago
        Again, what brands? I have never experienced this buying shoes from both big and small brands. Adidas, Nike, Allbirds, Converse, John Elliott, Beckett Simonon, etc. Maybe kids shoes are a different ballgame? Also never experienced this with clothes. I buy everything online and it always fits as I would expect from the measurements listed on the website.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        I have experienced this with Levi jeans. I buy a nice pair of jeans, they fit well, look nice, affordable etc. I need more jeans, so I go to the store a month later and try on a bunch of different jeans. One pair says they are the same size but fit entirely different, so I chalk it up as being a different "fit" of jeans. Nope, when I get home, they were an IDENTICAL pair, but fit like a different size.
  - dustymcp 3y ago
    I worked in retail electronics and this is exactly what happens, there is no procedure than put it back in the box and sell it again.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers. That's a distinctly American problem. As is the (over)use of credit cards in general. Here in Europe, the main worry was simply paying in advance and not getting the item. Early on, the popular choice was just paying to the postman on delivery - it moved some of the risk on to the seller, but it was balanced out by the seller making this option ~50% more expensive. It took some time for people to get used to dispute processes in marketplaces, and then for the laws to be updated with additional safeguards (e.g. 14 days no-questions-asked return policy for online purchases, which I think is an EU directive), and at some point, transferring money in advance of delivery became a normal practice. That was even before payment gateways, or even smartphones, became ubiquitous.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    American here, I remember buying some items online via check because of the fear of credit card theft, haha. It wasn't super common but I did it a few times. You'd "purchase" the item online, get a code in response, and you'd write the code in the memo area of the check and mail it out. I was definitely scared I'd never receive my package but thankfully it always worked out. I never paid too much for that reason, I think the most I paid was $90 for a hard to find game cartridge.
  - mach1ne 3y ago
    I'm European and the main problem I remember was the fear of losing credit card information. Old people are still scared.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
The simplest contrast is ChatGPT vs VR right now. OpenAI is up to over a billion of users and hundreds of millions of subscribers in <6 months, from a huge cross-section of markets. VR has a few million users at most after ~10 years, and almost all of them are gamers. There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  And peak VR gaming circa 2023 seems to be Gorilla Tag and Beat Saber. Not saying those are bad games, but…
  - brookst 3y ago
    Sure, to the extent peak non-VR gaming is candy crush. Most gaming will be casual, in VR just like non-VR. But there are much better and deeper games in both cases.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Alright lets put it this way: For fiveish years now, there have been basically copies of CS:GO and CoD in VR, games that get up to millions of daily users, and the VR versions of those games get like, hundreds of players, if that. VR just isn't that wanted by average people. "Immersion" just isn't a magic panacea that older execs seem to think it is, and being in a "virtual world" while you play most games don't make them better games! Oddly enough, most people don't play videogames to emulate real activities, but rather to play games, with their own made up rules and concepts. FIFA on the Xbox is nothing like actual soccer, but the players prefer it like that, and a FIFA that requires you to kick the ball with your real foot and costs hundreds of dollars is NOT better as a game, or more fun to most people, than "flat" FIFA. We literally already went over this with the Wii; shoehorning in "realism" into games that don't benefit from it just makes shitty games.
      - brookst 3y ago
        I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I believe you’re reasoning in circles between “immersion hasn’t been better enough to merit interest” and “immersion can never be good enough to merit interest”
saurik 3y ago
I mean, smartphones existed for a long time before anyone cared, and it was only due to Blackberry (for business) and then Apple (for consumers) that that happened: until then the entire space was seen as nerdy and pointless (and was thereby something my friends and I were excited by... despite not having any real use for any of it yet). And like... are you sure about being able to buy stuff online? I remember when being able to buy pizza online was new and there was a TV show in Japan about some crazy guy trying to survive off of stuff he ordered on the Internet, and the entire concept was just not a thing normal people were into... remember: the dot-com "boom" was actually a bubble and a lot of the stuff that came out during it failed.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It happened in Europe, Africa and Asia, we aren't at fault if PDAs, Symbian and feature phones were largely ignored on American continent.
- detourdog 3y ago
  not on your list is the Palm Treo.
codeulike 3y ago
It the late 90s a technology professional calmly explained to me that nobody would ever do their supermarket shopping online because they would not able to select fruit and vegetables by hand to look for the 'good' ones
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  And he was right. Still going to the market myself for the veggies.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    What are you talking about? I see a large number of grocery store employees gather up wares for curbside or delivery every time I go to the supermarket. All of my area supermarkets have dedicated sections for these ways of shopping!
    - vel0city 3y ago
      And then on top of that the popularity of meal kits as well supplanting some amount of grocery shopping.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        And any discussion about those meal kits is full of people complaining about low quality produce, and many of them quitting their subscription because of it.
    - bluedonuts 3y ago
      Because when the grocery store employee picks the fruit for you online order they don’t care about getting the ripe ones with no blemishes. Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
jasode 3y ago
>I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, Yes, it was laughed at and during the early internet days, people were skeptical that online shopping would become mainstream. An example includes the famous prediction from Clifford Stoll from 1995[1] : >Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. [...] Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. Clifford was correct in that brick & mortar stores wouldn't become obsolete. But he was very wrong about the mass consumer adoption of internet shopping. Many agreed with his mispredictions at the time. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
arethuza 3y ago
"but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at" It was definitely laughed at by people like travel agents - remember them? I can remember discussing it with people in the travel industry around '94 and '95 and they literally laughed at the idea of people arranging travel online.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Maybe they were laughing out of fear for their job.

by roomey 3y ago

mach1ne 3y ago

It was laughed at by consumers. There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers.

crimsontech 3y ago
Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. Early online shopping was a big gamble with different stores having different rules. It was often a frustrating experience. Distance selling regulations helped with it a lot. I can buy a product online and if I'm not happy with it, for any reason, I can send it back for a refund. This just isn't the case with shopping in a store. I learned this the hard way twice buying in store from Argos in the UK, only to get home and find I had bought a used product which someone else had returned already. Argos refused to refund or replace the items because they are used. I looked this up at the time and it seemed to be a common occurrence, I can only assume people returned items they bought online and Argos just put them back on the shelves. Had I bought it online and had it delivered to my house I could have returned it. I buy online wherever possible now. Interestingly "click-and-collect" services are not covered by distance selling regulations which is how I got burned twice by Argos.
- pmontra 3y ago
  > Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. This is why I still buy clothes, shoes and sport gears at stores. Returning products takes time and you still don't have what you wanted to buy. If I buy a new item of the very same model I bought before, that's OK to buy online. Unfortunately companies keep changing models every year.
  - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    What brands are you buying from that change models every year??
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Pretty much every clothing brand out there, and usually more often than once a year. Also at this point they don't give a damn about quality controls. E.g. there was a time when you could order shoes online rather reliably. Today? What you get in the mail is barely correlated with the size you specified on the order. From the last 10 days: we order two pairs for our kids, size X and Y - which we selected by actually following measurement instructions of the shoe company. When the order comes, it it turns out size X is too big for the younger kid, size Y is too small for the older. We return those, and order again, this time sizes (X-1) and (Y+1). What we got is... the (X-1) shoes were identical to X shoes (therefore still too large); the (Y+1) shoes were like Y+3 - way overshooting the target. This was same models, same company, with no logistical confusion according to labels. Just one of multiple similar events we had (and many more I heard about from others) where the size of shoes received was pretty much random. So this is one category of goods that we're going back to buying in person. And yes, that means dragging a 1.5 y.o. and a 4 y.o. into a shoe store in a large mall - the very one I mentioned above. Yes, our kids will likely get overwhelmed by lights and wares and ads, and start making all kinds of scenes. I don't care. If the store doesn't want a scene, they should not be routinely fucking up their order sizes.
      - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
        Again, what brands? I have never experienced this buying shoes from both big and small brands. Adidas, Nike, Allbirds, Converse, John Elliott, Beckett Simonon, etc. Maybe kids shoes are a different ballgame? Also never experienced this with clothes. I buy everything online and it always fits as I would expect from the measurements listed on the website.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        I have experienced this with Levi jeans. I buy a nice pair of jeans, they fit well, look nice, affordable etc. I need more jeans, so I go to the store a month later and try on a bunch of different jeans. One pair says they are the same size but fit entirely different, so I chalk it up as being a different "fit" of jeans. Nope, when I get home, they were an IDENTICAL pair, but fit like a different size.
- dustymcp 3y ago
  I worked in retail electronics and this is exactly what happens, there is no procedure than put it back in the box and sell it again.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers. That's a distinctly American problem. As is the (over)use of credit cards in general. Here in Europe, the main worry was simply paying in advance and not getting the item. Early on, the popular choice was just paying to the postman on delivery - it moved some of the risk on to the seller, but it was balanced out by the seller making this option ~50% more expensive. It took some time for people to get used to dispute processes in marketplaces, and then for the laws to be updated with additional safeguards (e.g. 14 days no-questions-asked return policy for online purchases, which I think is an EU directive), and at some point, transferring money in advance of delivery became a normal practice. That was even before payment gateways, or even smartphones, became ubiquitous.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  American here, I remember buying some items online via check because of the fear of credit card theft, haha. It wasn't super common but I did it a few times. You'd "purchase" the item online, get a code in response, and you'd write the code in the memo area of the check and mail it out. I was definitely scared I'd never receive my package but thankfully it always worked out. I never paid too much for that reason, I think the most I paid was $90 for a hard to find game cartridge.
- mach1ne 3y ago
  I'm European and the main problem I remember was the fear of losing credit card information. Old people are still scared.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

The simplest contrast is ChatGPT vs VR right now. OpenAI is up to over a billion of users and hundreds of millions of subscribers in <6 months, from a huge cross-section of markets. VR has a few million users at most after ~10 years, and almost all of them are gamers. There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
And peak VR gaming circa 2023 seems to be Gorilla Tag and Beat Saber. Not saying those are bad games, but…
- brookst 3y ago
  Sure, to the extent peak non-VR gaming is candy crush. Most gaming will be casual, in VR just like non-VR. But there are much better and deeper games in both cases.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Alright lets put it this way: For fiveish years now, there have been basically copies of CS:GO and CoD in VR, games that get up to millions of daily users, and the VR versions of those games get like, hundreds of players, if that. VR just isn't that wanted by average people. "Immersion" just isn't a magic panacea that older execs seem to think it is, and being in a "virtual world" while you play most games don't make them better games! Oddly enough, most people don't play videogames to emulate real activities, but rather to play games, with their own made up rules and concepts. FIFA on the Xbox is nothing like actual soccer, but the players prefer it like that, and a FIFA that requires you to kick the ball with your real foot and costs hundreds of dollars is NOT better as a game, or more fun to most people, than "flat" FIFA. We literally already went over this with the Wii; shoehorning in "realism" into games that don't benefit from it just makes shitty games.
    - brookst 3y ago
      I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I believe you’re reasoning in circles between “immersion hasn’t been better enough to merit interest” and “immersion can never be good enough to merit interest”

saurik 3y ago

I mean, smartphones existed for a long time before anyone cared, and it was only due to Blackberry (for business) and then Apple (for consumers) that that happened: until then the entire space was seen as nerdy and pointless (and was thereby something my friends and I were excited by... despite not having any real use for any of it yet). And like... are you sure about being able to buy stuff online? I remember when being able to buy pizza online was new and there was a TV show in Japan about some crazy guy trying to survive off of stuff he ordered on the Internet, and the entire concept was just not a thing normal people were into... remember: the dot-com "boom" was actually a bubble and a lot of the stuff that came out during it failed.

pjmlp 3y ago
It happened in Europe, Africa and Asia, we aren't at fault if PDAs, Symbian and feature phones were largely ignored on American continent.
detourdog 3y ago
not on your list is the Palm Treo.

codeulike 3y ago

It the late 90s a technology professional calmly explained to me that nobody would ever do their supermarket shopping online because they would not able to select fruit and vegetables by hand to look for the 'good' ones

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
And he was right. Still going to the market myself for the veggies.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  What are you talking about? I see a large number of grocery store employees gather up wares for curbside or delivery every time I go to the supermarket. All of my area supermarkets have dedicated sections for these ways of shopping!
  - vel0city 3y ago
    And then on top of that the popularity of meal kits as well supplanting some amount of grocery shopping.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      And any discussion about those meal kits is full of people complaining about low quality produce, and many of them quitting their subscription because of it.
  - bluedonuts 3y ago
    Because when the grocery store employee picks the fruit for you online order they don’t care about getting the ripe ones with no blemishes. Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago

jasode 3y ago

>I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, Yes, it was laughed at and during the early internet days, people were skeptical that online shopping would become mainstream. An example includes the famous prediction from Clifford Stoll from 1995[1] : >Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. [...] Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. Clifford was correct in that brick & mortar stores wouldn't become obsolete. But he was very wrong about the mass consumer adoption of internet shopping. Many agreed with his mispredictions at the time. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

arethuza 3y ago

"but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at" It was definitely laughed at by people like travel agents - remember them? I can remember discussing it with people in the travel industry around '94 and '95 and they literally laughed at the idea of people arranging travel online.

mrguyorama 3y ago
Maybe they were laughing out of fear for their job.