[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

Everyone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.

[100721]

For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

But a lot of stuff had to be invented and Bezos was the person to do it. Amazon sounded intense to work for to get to where it is.

[lumost]

People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.

How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.

[dragonwriter]

> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...]

> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know

Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.

So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.

[throwaway173738]

people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.