> Really? Selling goods online (Amazon) is not AGI. It didn’t take a huge leap to think that bookstores on the web could scale. Nobody knew if it would be Amazo

> Really? Selling goods online (Amazon) is not AGI. It didn’t take a huge leap to think that bookstores on the web could scale. Nobody knew if it would be Amazon to pull it off, sure, but I mean ostensibly why not? (Yes, yes hindsight being what it is…) I don't think you remember the dot-com era. Loads of people thought Amazon and Pets.com were hilarious ideas. Cliff Stoll wrote a whole book on how the Internet was going to do nothing useful and we were all going to buy stuff (yes, the books too) at bricks-and-mortar, which was rapturously received and got him into _Newsweek_ (back when everyone read that). "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 obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"