I started working in the "internet economy" around 2004, when the web was coming back. I worked on several small eccommerce projects and I read a lot of comment

I started working in the "internet economy" around 2004, when the web was coming back. I worked on several small eccommerce projects and I read a lot of commentary. I really thought ecommerce imminent industrial revolution scale. - Affiliate marketing was a buzzword. Adwords ads placed by affiliates were common. - Dropshipping was a buzzword. It seemed like a matter of time before all factories would be dropshippers. - Google had just made online advertising make sense - Amazon had survived the bust - Hosted carts were getting good. Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of these believers. But, I didn't believe that there were long term businesses to be had gluing together all these things. If all the eccommerce "site" was going to be doing was paying affiliates and forwarding orders to dropshipping suppliers, that could be all automated. If all affiliate marketers were doing was pointing links to products, they could be 'eaten" by a product search engine like (the promising new Google Products). Eventually what we would have is factories, postmen & search engines. All the intermediaries wouldn't be necessary. What I thought I was seeing was the etherialization of the entire retail-to-manufacturing chain. When a product starts getting produced, it puts itself on the ether. People buy it. It gets shipped factory-to-consumer. The efficiencies are mind boggling. It turned out that all the details I thought would be solved, turned out to be bigger barriers than expected. Even a small-medium retailer that wants to buy direct from factories, will have a hard time, never mind the consumer. Online transactions still suck. Shipping still sucks (in many places). The experience is still "of.f" That kind of "etheriazation" didn't even happen for digital products. But, I think that we are still moving in that direction. The Alibaba group IPO is a hint at steps in that direction. They are working closer to the manufacturer end of the manufacturer-consumer chain. "Modern supply chains" is a big and hard to understand part of the transition too: H&M, Zara, Dell, Tesla. These are all examples. I'm not sure how to wrap it all up. I think that retail is being eaten by software, but it isn't happening on the 5-10 schedule we expect from "eaten by software" revolutions.