Sorry, I was referring to how it was obvious to so many that Barnes & Noble and Borders would crush this fledgling website founded by the kook who set out in a van to compete with them.

> Sorry, I was referring to how it was obvious to so many that Barnes & Noble and Borders would crush this fledgling website founded by the kook who set out in a van to compete with them.

I remember Amazon's launch quite well, and I don't remember any of that sentiment. The first time I used Amazon I remember thinking "Wow, books are the perfect thing to sell online." I feel like it's become part of a standard origin mythology to play up the founder as "some kook with a crazy dream" that everyone else thought was insane. I think that's rarely the case, and is instead played up in an effort of founder worship.

There was some of that... generally, skepticism that internet startups would become large enough to challenge businesses like Walmart, ever. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiti...

And also people saying things like tiny businesses of people with bookstores in their spare time will make Amazon obsolete... https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/02/26/opinion/foreign-affair...

Ah, Thomas Friedman. Thanks for the advice to not buy amazon stock in 1999.

Out of curiosity, I went to have a look at AMZN's stock price at the date the article was published, to see how the stock price during the heady heights of the dotcom bubble compared to today.

Interestingly, if you view the entire stock history price chart, the dotcom bubble is barely a blip.

IMO, the right way to look at long-term performance of an investment is on a semi-log chart. (Day or week charts, I prefer linear; anything 3 month or longer, I prefer semi-log.)

Semi-log (where constant percentage changes are constant-sized), it's more than a blip. Linear (where constant dollar changes are constant-sized) charting hides past market moves if the overall bias has been up and exaggerates past market moves if the overall bias has been down. This can lead investors to improperly discount the pain/gain cycle that happened over that time period.

Linear charting: http://bit.ly/2tk5Ulj

Semi log: http://bit.ly/2sJs7ec

Now that I also actually take a look, while his theory has not panned out the way he thought, it is true that Amazon would have been a poor investment for most of the decade following 2000.

I agree with hn_throwaway_. Amazon having no chance in people's eyes and being discarded by everyone seems to be an exaggeration.

I wasn't even in middle school/junior high when I and some other classmates started using Amazon. We loved using it for getting books. There was no weirdness about it. In fact, in my memories, using Amazon was completely normal and seemed like a good idea. This would be in 2000 and 2001.

Obvious to a young person like you. Clearly Amazon understood their market. But it was not obvious to entrenched businesses and all investors. Even Warren Buffet admits he made a mistake about Google.

Warren Buffett said those things very recently. He has always been against most tech and web companies because he doesn't understand the space. Buffett was already entering his 70s once the dot com bubble burst and you could look at companies in a better sense. I can see a good example being used. I don't think Buffett is one though.

Amazon's digital/technological backend lets them put WF retail spaces to more productive use, so it's still an asset and not a liability.

> devil's avocado

I can imagine the headlines. “AVOCADO TOAST FAD MAY BE LINKED TO DEVIL WORSHIP”