To be fair, though, the first 15 (27?) years of the web were terrible. There was no way Sears was going to go whole-hog on 1990's web. Or 1993's web. Or 1999's web. It's barely usable now (he says, typing this into a web forum in 2016). A cow-orker of mine has a paper copy of the "1994 Internet yellow pages" and guess how many web sites are included? 0!

Yes, somebody should have come up with Amazon before Amazon did. But they didn't, and here we are now.