It’s quite unbelievable that it was literally right there. The logistics were like 60% solved for them already, the remaining 40% was just making sure the online content remained linked with inventory and fulfillment, and expanding that capability.
“We think online shopping will be just a fad” - the unimaginable hubris…
I was refreshing myself on wiki. They launched prodigy, but it was too early for online shopping to be popular. So they probably got a bad taste for that kind of thing. A concept in venture capital is that it’s all about timing.
Ohh I forgot they did Prodigy. It was such a WEIRD experience; it seemed to drop you down into this BBS/DOS mode, and none of the navigation was very similar to everything else on any PC/Mac at the time. I enjoyed some of the games on it but I really didn’t know what to think otherwise. We didn’t keep it very long.
Sears. They got wrecked by the internet.
Sears had a massive mail order catalog. Easy to switch that to Internet, right? But they decided to focus on stores.
It’s quite unbelievable that it was literally right there. The logistics were like 60% solved for them already, the remaining 40% was just making sure the online content remained linked with inventory and fulfillment, and expanding that capability.
“We think online shopping will be just a fad” - the unimaginable hubris…
I was refreshing myself on wiki. They launched prodigy, but it was too early for online shopping to be popular. So they probably got a bad taste for that kind of thing. A concept in venture capital is that it’s all about timing.
Ohh I forgot they did Prodigy. It was such a WEIRD experience; it seemed to drop you down into this BBS/DOS mode, and none of the navigation was very similar to everything else on any PC/Mac at the time. I enjoyed some of the games on it but I really didn’t know what to think otherwise. We didn’t keep it very long.
Can you fill us in on what it was exactly? I’m rather confused but I think I got online store out of it man