Still hands-down my favorite first-chapter of a book.
I give Stephenson credit for taking that guarantee to its logical extreme. And while I love the book, it's funny how basically none of the predictions in it came true. No computers that project images on eyeballs, no 'poon guns, no losers walking around scanning retinas with backpack-mounted lasers, and book features working payphone booths!
0. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/22/business/domino-s-ends-fa...
Actually, we have something close to that now:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...
It doesn't use lasers though.
The tech is basically working, and they're ramping up to production this year.
And no, you can't just walk around arbitrarily, but you couldn't do that in the book either (you could walk out of range). Also, Stephenson didn't worry about just turning your back to the laser projector...
You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed.
But it didn't.
It went on to become one of the great success stories of the modern era.
But, in this case, it sure seems, in hindsight, like it should have been predictable. My first thought when I heard about the company was, "How do they keep the toppings from flying all over the place if the truck hits a pothole or has to make as sudden stop or something, and the cheese hasn't softened enough to stick it in place? And how do they keep the cheese from sloshing all over the place after it melts?"
It would seem, based on what I'm reading now, that my error was assuming that they had thought of something clever and wondering what it was. Because the answers turn out to be (1) skimp on the toppings, and (2) you can't, it just plays out like a scene from Astérix chez les Helvètes† back there.
I can infer from this that I, a person who was just sitting on their armchair having a knee-jerk reaction, still managed to think more deeply about this business plan than any of the key figures or investors.
Starbucks, on the other hand, seems to have always had a basic grasp of how coffee behaves vis a vis Newton's First Law of Motion.
†(DDG image search seems to do a better job than Google at turning up the cheesiest panels.)
I didn’t expect such a literal interpretation: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-raves-xxvii-an...
> You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed.
Not really. Starbucks started as a coffee shop, and started expanding when they became successful. There's a limit to how ridiculous that can be.
Sidenote: epic thread
https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/starb...
What the author is alluding too is the fact that putting a bunch of robots into a pizza store isn't going to turn you into a technology company worth hundreds of millions, that is absurd right from the beginning.
Starbucks success imho was due to their having a sufficiently well controlled process to make a consistently decent (if not excellent) cup of coffee in _all_ their stores. Their competitors are all over the place in both the time and location axes.
That and the interior of the stores are typically more appealing than McDonalds.
Fun Fact: He lost EVERY investment in the last bust, save for getting lucky with Alibaba.
Presumably many local pizzeria owners have never heard of Masayoshi Son; presumably many more just would never have thought “oh we’re actually a pizza tech company and we need hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital funding to scale.” But if you have the proper mindset, if you believe in yourself, if you are not a guy opening a pizza place but a founder who previously sold a tech company, if you hire a strategic and retail consultant, if you test out various combinations of “[giant tech company] of [broad category including pizza]” for the pitch, if you call your pizzeria “the Gigaranch” or “the Pizzaplex” rather than “Al’s Pizza & Subs,” and sure sure sure yes fine if you employ some robots to careen around town sloshing cheese around trucks, then maybe you can be the pizza proprietor to rake in Masayoshi Son’s millions.
You craft a pitch calculated to convince Masayoshi Son that your pizza delivery business will change the world. You meet with Masayoshi Son. He convinces you that you will change the world. Now you are all believers, all in it together. He hands you piles of money. You go home and weep to your friends, “I am going to change the world.” The friends are like “wait what with the pizzas?” But it is too late for skepticism, you have the money, the robots are in the trucks, they are fanning out across town, the cheese is everywhere, they cannot turn back.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-14/robot-...