Re:The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is...
by th0ma5 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @12:29AM
(#18226511)
I'm not convinced this would've worked. It would've been too early. 56k modems were cutting edge then and you still needed a desktop. Amazon sold only books mostly for quite some time around then. Also, there was a lot of hype around the net and "www" was pretty awkward to get people to wrap their heads around. It would've been a lot of money about 10 years too early.
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Re:The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is...
by acdha on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @09:06AM
(#18228997)
Amazon was still profitable after the first couple of years even with those limits, and people were racing to get online — decidedly not just geeks.
It wouldn’t have converted the catalog business overnight but Sears was really well positioned, especially with local stores to handle returns and service. If they’d invested then, they’d have been prepared as broadband started to appear (for timing, I went from 56k dialup to 10Mb cable in 1998).
Re:The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is...
by jhbadger on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @09:30AM
(#18229165)
Although people forget that the conversion of Amazon to an "everything store" was later -- 1998/1999. For the first four years of its existence it was just a book store. The "everything store" phase was in the early cable modem era.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-exp...
Re:The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is...
by delecti on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @12:41PM
(#18230817)
They already had the catalog though, and the related infrastructure, and the name recognition of both. "It's the catalog but on your computer" would have been easy enough for people to understand.