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One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, and their online store was built on NextStep'

One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, and their online store was built on NextStep's WebObjects, just as Apple's store would be. Also interesting that Jobs had Apple pay to use Amazon's one click ordering patent at a time when other online retailers didn't see the point of removing sales friction. > Why Amazon’s ‘1-Click’ Ordering Was a Game Changer https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/amazons-1-click-goes-off-patent/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...

deanCommie 3y ago
I remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek. The longer I stay in this industry, and the more I learn about compliance, customer surprise, and the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability, the more I realize it absolutely was.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on the difficulty?
  - deanCommie 3y ago
    OK, I think the difficulty isn't the first level of implementation, but all the edge cases. I think that's true about a lot of innovation. So yes, the elevator pitch is just "remember the shipping and billing details, and use it by default". But the question is the edge cases: First, you have to remember that this came at a time when people were still nervous about even giving your credit card to a website. Cross-web identity wasn't a thing, password managers weren't a thing. Second, you need intelligence for what are the default options to select? It's easy for iTunes when the delivery is digital, or for a Prime member when 99% of the time the shipping is free. But what about for everyone else - should 1 click choose the fastest shipping or the cheapest? Is there a 3rd option? OK, you might say the customer should be able to customize that in the profile. But A) what if they don't, and B) what are the extreme edge cases? If someone wants it the fastest, is it worth it if it costs 100$? Or is it a % of the cost of the good? Is faster shipping by 1 day worth it if the shipping costs twice as much? And so on.
  - runako 3y ago
    > the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability Not sure what the OP had in mind, but my current favorite example is Expedia. I have used Expedia consistently for over 15 years. Have bought many flights for the family etc. over the years. They know who I travel with. Yet if I open Expedia now to book a flight, I will have to enter the ages of my kids again, as if Expedia didn't know their birthdays. Apparently it is difficult to get the balance correct.
    - dustyleary 3y ago
      It's not a question about difficulty, it's that nobody really gives a shit. I'm sure everyone on this site knows that it would not be difficult at all to implement this. Perhaps there is some valid legal concern over remembering minors' data, but if so, you can pretty easily come up with another dozen examples of sites elsewhere having similar issues with non-sensitive data. The problem is that you usually have to have someone who is actually passionate about the product to drive all these little things home. Maybe this was a bug that was the next item on their backlog, but then someone in the chain of command said "it's good enough now, ship it.", and then everyone got moved on to the next thing. Almost everyone at most companies, at all levels, is just doing a job. Very few people actually care about the product.
      - abecedarius 3y ago
        Was the patent technically nonobvious? The concerns in this seem to be saying it can be hard to overcome organizational and legacy friction instead, as far as I can tell. I never heard of anything nonobvious at the time either.
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      Should storing people's ages also be patentable?
      - runako 3y ago
        To the extent that business models are patentable, maybe so? We're 25+ years into online travel, and nobody has implemented it. Maybe it's one of those things that looks simple but isn't? For technical difficulty, it's certainly no less difficult than storing credit card details for reuse, and that passed muster at the PTO. All that said, I am excited to see what's (hopefully?) coming. A travel site should be able to intuit what kind of trip I'm planning, or ask me if it's not obvious. If I do a search for a city that I fly to every other week, perhaps it's okay to just go ahead and sort to the top the same flights and hotel I used last time. If the flight is in the summer and to a popular vacation area, perhaps guess that my family will also be traveling. These things have all been technically possible for decades, but we don't see them in the wild. Maybe they are less obvious or more difficult than they appear from the outside (I have never built a travel agent).
- barnabee 3y ago
  I’m still furious that this is considered patentable.
- EdwardCoffin 3y ago
  I recall an interview with someone about this - I think it was Tim O'Reilly - where it turned out that Bezos had a hard time getting the developers to even see the value in it. They kept putting in confirmation dialogs and he'd have to go back and tell them to take the confirmation out, and that was what persuaded O'Reilly it really was innovative, the fact that it was difficult to get the programmers of the feature to even understand the requirement. Edit: maybe not O'Reilly, since he penned this [1]. Maybe it was Kevin Kelly? [1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537
chollida1 3y ago
> One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, I thought gateway 2000 was a big online retailer around that time. In fact I thought it was them more than Dell that lead the online push. I guess I’m misremembering as it was 25 years ago.
- jb1991 3y ago
  Gateway was everyone’s computer at that time. All my friends and family had Gateway. Dell blossomed later.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Both started their online stores in 1996. Dell's whole business model, though, was cutting down on inventory (JIT/Lean style) and intermediaries. Dell didn't sell through big box stores and others like Gateway and the rest did.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Gateway tried to expand by opening its own stores, but ultimately closed them all because they lost money. Thus when Apple opened its own store it was seen as a desperate gamble (perhaps it was? I no longer remember) and destined to fail.
- majikandy 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, as we got a 486 dx2 66 from gateway 2000, complete with a faulty quad speed cd writer, ms office and encarta. And of course… the cow box. But this was ordered over the telephone from adverts I kept up to date with in computer magazines and the moment the dx2 66 was the best price (the 100 was the silly price one) I got my parents to pull the trigger and buy it. Happy times circa 1993.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Wow, a CD writer at the time a 486 was still a reasonable proposition must have cost more than the machine itself!? We had one of the earliest CD writers in the UK, paired with a Pentium with MMX, and the writer price was still comparable to the rest of the machine put together!
zubairq 3y ago
Wow, I never knew that Apple actually paid Amazon to use the patent. Very insightful!
pjmlp 3y ago
Another interesting thing, is that for all the hate Java EE got, it was originally an Objective-C framework, Distributed Objects Everywhere, developed at Sun, during their Sun/NeXT OpenSTEP collaboration, inspired by Web Objects.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deanCommie 3y ago

I remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek. The longer I stay in this industry, and the more I learn about compliance, customer surprise, and the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability, the more I realize it absolutely was.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Can you elaborate on the difficulty?
- deanCommie 3y ago
  OK, I think the difficulty isn't the first level of implementation, but all the edge cases. I think that's true about a lot of innovation. So yes, the elevator pitch is just "remember the shipping and billing details, and use it by default". But the question is the edge cases: First, you have to remember that this came at a time when people were still nervous about even giving your credit card to a website. Cross-web identity wasn't a thing, password managers weren't a thing. Second, you need intelligence for what are the default options to select? It's easy for iTunes when the delivery is digital, or for a Prime member when 99% of the time the shipping is free. But what about for everyone else - should 1 click choose the fastest shipping or the cheapest? Is there a 3rd option? OK, you might say the customer should be able to customize that in the profile. But A) what if they don't, and B) what are the extreme edge cases? If someone wants it the fastest, is it worth it if it costs 100$? Or is it a % of the cost of the good? Is faster shipping by 1 day worth it if the shipping costs twice as much? And so on.
- runako 3y ago
  > the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability Not sure what the OP had in mind, but my current favorite example is Expedia. I have used Expedia consistently for over 15 years. Have bought many flights for the family etc. over the years. They know who I travel with. Yet if I open Expedia now to book a flight, I will have to enter the ages of my kids again, as if Expedia didn't know their birthdays. Apparently it is difficult to get the balance correct.
  - dustyleary 3y ago
    It's not a question about difficulty, it's that nobody really gives a shit. I'm sure everyone on this site knows that it would not be difficult at all to implement this. Perhaps there is some valid legal concern over remembering minors' data, but if so, you can pretty easily come up with another dozen examples of sites elsewhere having similar issues with non-sensitive data. The problem is that you usually have to have someone who is actually passionate about the product to drive all these little things home. Maybe this was a bug that was the next item on their backlog, but then someone in the chain of command said "it's good enough now, ship it.", and then everyone got moved on to the next thing. Almost everyone at most companies, at all levels, is just doing a job. Very few people actually care about the product.
    - abecedarius 3y ago
      Was the patent technically nonobvious? The concerns in this seem to be saying it can be hard to overcome organizational and legacy friction instead, as far as I can tell. I never heard of anything nonobvious at the time either.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Should storing people's ages also be patentable?
    - runako 3y ago
      To the extent that business models are patentable, maybe so? We're 25+ years into online travel, and nobody has implemented it. Maybe it's one of those things that looks simple but isn't? For technical difficulty, it's certainly no less difficult than storing credit card details for reuse, and that passed muster at the PTO. All that said, I am excited to see what's (hopefully?) coming. A travel site should be able to intuit what kind of trip I'm planning, or ask me if it's not obvious. If I do a search for a city that I fly to every other week, perhaps it's okay to just go ahead and sort to the top the same flights and hotel I used last time. If the flight is in the summer and to a popular vacation area, perhaps guess that my family will also be traveling. These things have all been technically possible for decades, but we don't see them in the wild. Maybe they are less obvious or more difficult than they appear from the outside (I have never built a travel agent).
barnabee 3y ago
I’m still furious that this is considered patentable.
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I recall an interview with someone about this - I think it was Tim O'Reilly - where it turned out that Bezos had a hard time getting the developers to even see the value in it. They kept putting in confirmation dialogs and he'd have to go back and tell them to take the confirmation out, and that was what persuaded O'Reilly it really was innovative, the fact that it was difficult to get the programmers of the feature to even understand the requirement. Edit: maybe not O'Reilly, since he penned this [1]. Maybe it was Kevin Kelly? [1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537

chollida1 3y ago

> One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, I thought gateway 2000 was a big online retailer around that time. In fact I thought it was them more than Dell that lead the online push. I guess I’m misremembering as it was 25 years ago.

jb1991 3y ago
Gateway was everyone’s computer at that time. All my friends and family had Gateway. Dell blossomed later.
Jtsummers 3y ago
Both started their online stores in 1996. Dell's whole business model, though, was cutting down on inventory (JIT/Lean style) and intermediaries. Dell didn't sell through big box stores and others like Gateway and the rest did.
- gumby 3y ago
  Gateway tried to expand by opening its own stores, but ultimately closed them all because they lost money. Thus when Apple opened its own store it was seen as a desperate gamble (perhaps it was? I no longer remember) and destined to fail.
majikandy 3y ago
I was thinking the same thing, as we got a 486 dx2 66 from gateway 2000, complete with a faulty quad speed cd writer, ms office and encarta. And of course… the cow box. But this was ordered over the telephone from adverts I kept up to date with in computer magazines and the moment the dx2 66 was the best price (the 100 was the silly price one) I got my parents to pull the trigger and buy it. Happy times circa 1993.
- jen20 3y ago
  Wow, a CD writer at the time a 486 was still a reasonable proposition must have cost more than the machine itself!? We had one of the earliest CD writers in the UK, paired with a Pentium with MMX, and the writer price was still comparable to the rest of the machine put together!

zubairq 3y ago

Wow, I never knew that Apple actually paid Amazon to use the patent. Very insightful!

pjmlp 3y ago

Another interesting thing, is that for all the hate Java EE got, it was originally an Objective-C framework, Distributed Objects Everywhere, developed at Sun, during their Sun/NeXT OpenSTEP collaboration, inspired by Web Objects.

deleted 3y ago

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