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'The Unwillingness To Foresee The Future' (stratechery.com)
An anonymous reader shares a few excerpts from Ben Thompson's analysis: Back in 2006, when the iPhone was a mere rumor, Palm CEO Ed Colligan was asked if he was worried: "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." What if Steve Jobs' company did bring an iPod phone to market? Well, it would probably use WiFi technology and could be distributed through the Apple stores and not the carriers like Verizon or Cingular, Colligan theorized." I was reminded of this quote after Amazon announced an agreement to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; after all, it was only two years ago that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey predicted that groceries would be Amazon's Waterloo. And while Colligan's prediction was far worse -- Apple simply left Palm in the dust, unable to compete -- it is Mackey who has to call Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Napoleon of this little morality play, boss. The similarities go deeper, though: both Colligan and Mackey made the same analytical mistakes: they mis-understood their opponents' goals, strategies, and tactics.
And the managers were total dipshits. A combination of arrogant and uninformed, and after Palm many of them continue to lay waste to start-ups in the valley. Idiots almost ruined the Kindle project at Amazon, until Seattle descended down upon them and started re-educating and cleaning house.
I think they made those statements to buy time from their own investors.
Amazon business model is a mail order catalog but on Internet. Therefore, we don't need to speculate how it would work - we can know for sure by looking at historical precedents. Smartphones and iPhone were different case, it isn't "phone on the Internet" but entirely new platform that created its own demand. Genius of Jobs was to recognize that people wanted access to cat pictures 24/7. No sane and rational individual would have guessed this is the case. The only way Amazon can be this Jobs-disruptive is if they come up with a new platform (e.g. e-reader for food) or a new method of delivery (e.g. drone to your drone landing pad).
I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on Living Social. I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on the Fire Phone. I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on Drugstore.com.
I know some people like to suck Jeff Bezo's dick but there is plenty of failure too.
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...can't even see the tip of their own nose.
The only meaningful prediction you can make about the future is that it will be strange and unexpected.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
" opponents' '"
It's not really fair to compare anything to a Steve Jobs product. He had the ability to create products with fewer compromises. He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
In that sense, Bezos did a similar thing when he sent his team back to the drawing board to make one-click purchasing actually work, and Amazon does really well in reducing barriers to purchasing because that's what gets customers to buy. The question is, can Amazon be the place where a sizeable chunk of people buy groceries? Sure, if it's more convenient for a large enough number of people, like scan a UPC off the back of a cereal box, and it shows up at the end of the day today at my house, ready for breakfast tomorrow. People say that's impossible. A Steve Jobs *knows* if it's possible, and if it is then won't stop pushing until his company makes it happen.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I consulted briefly for Palm, doing an Open Source training that literally nobody who was invited was interested in hearing. I think they mostly invited the wrong folks. People were really angry that I did things like use examples, rather than just stating the point so that they could get out of there. I usually get good feedback on trainings.
One of their largest problems was that they were unwilling to abandon the 250,000 applications that they stated were built for their original Motorola 68000 architecture. So, when they came out with an ARM-based Palm, that ARM ran a 68000 emulator, and their entire operating system ran in the emulator along with all apps. So, it was obvious this company wasn't agile enough to keep up with new technology.
Of course, I suggested that they base on Linux and build their APIs on top of it. But then, I suggested this to Symbian, too, and they listened just as well - which was not at all. All of those folks thought they had some sort of magic in their kernel and invested unspeakable amounts of money in it. In Palm's case, they had a shared memory architecture that they felt would be difficult to implement on Linux.
Eventually, one of their business successors took on Linux, but way to late to salvage the business.
Bruce Perens.
So, we're going to argue about folks who are able to tell fortunes but refuse to see the future?
Really?
I thought finance was the only field where fortune telling was taken seriously. You know, when they consider estimates and projections as facts.
Or the champs are Presidential administrations who make budgets and promote tax cuts on future economic growth as if it already happened.
I am still reeling from disappointment over Amazon buying the elitist Whole Foods.
Organic food requires more farmland per kilo of crop yield.
Organic wastes more water and energy per kilo of crop yield.
Organic food increases the cost of adequate nutrition for poor people.
Organic food is no safer and no healthier than GMO.
Organic food is evil.
How can anyone support organic food? I can understand hating Monsanto for its business practice. They are evil. But GMO itself is better than organic.
Don't hate GMO because you hate the business practices of one company.
Jeff Bezos got up in the morning, was feeling lousy and wanted to make his mom's best comfort food, chicken soup. So he mumbled "Alexa! buy Whole Foods Chicken Stock". That damned machine bought Whole Foods instead. Not willing to concede Alexa is horribly broken he is trying to act as if he always meant to buy the company.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Doesn't that make Mackey "the Napoleon in this little morality play" (altho w/ Bezos involved, I'm pretty sure it's an immorality play)?
Why is it that so many think that these megacompanies just can't pull this kind of thing off? While I appreciate the idea of agile companies with a small footprint I can also appreciate companies with strong underpinnings that can keep a business model alive infinitely even as it losses money.
This is no different from the Tesla cheerleaders who are claiming The Big Three will fold in a couple of decades... The Big Three can keep in the game even if profits dwindle by subsiding less popular efforts for a long, long time. That gives them plenty of leg room to work out the kinks while having a large supply of capital makes it easy to afford the talent where needed. Musk isn't doing Tesla single handedly and he had the virtues of a good capital base with lots of government money floating around. The Big Three have that and even better in the area of government interest.
I can't help but think that some small companies talk themselves up is to keep investors in the game more than any kind of realistic advantage they have in the market. So the quote on the surface doesn't reflect the reality of what they're trying to achieve by stating it.
Apple didn't buy their way in (in the sense of taking over an existing player), they just came in cold and leveled every major industry player. Mackey was largely correct. Amazon couldn't compete on their own. Whole Foods was not blind sided or left a smoking ruin like Nokia or Palm. They got paid!
So Amazon went and bought yet another company. AFAIK they're still not profitable and AFAICT organic foodies like buying local and from people they know and can meet in person. Also the newest bottleneck Amazon an Co aparently are facing ist existing delivery infrastructure.
So unless this delivery robot/drone thingie takes off, food delivery might just hit a wall soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The purchase of Whole Foods has more to do with buying distributed retail space and converting even more to automated checkout.
It won't affect people like me who don't buy Amazon stuff and who go to the local PCC or QFC for groceries and never use automated checkout.
Think of it as a distribution game changer and a launch point for drone delivery.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Amazon, Uber etc are very innovative in creative lawyering. Like Uber's drivers are not its employess and how Uber is not a taxi company. Amazon will call Whole Foods not a grocery store or something.
An average pizza order is about 20$. There is nothing more perishable than a pizza. They can be delivered in 30 minutes. So Amazon (or Walmart or Home Depot for that matter) can accept orders in the web site, have robot assisted people fill the order and make a grocery basket all saran wrapped and be ready to deliver, for the time it takes to bake a pizza. So it is not impossible. And Walmart can create a franchise just to deliver stuff from its warehouse to homes. Mom and pop pizza shop owners can carve up the territory and get Walmart delivery franchises. UPS+Walmart alliance or a Target+FedEx alliance can do the warehouse to mom-and-pop pizza shop run once or twice a day. The pizza shops can take care of the last five miles delivery leg.
There was a time when milk bread and eggs were delivered daily to homes. The point is, even if it demonstrates such a gee-whizz method, others can follow quickly and undercut Amazon. What can amazon do that others can not simply copy? Unless Bezos has a ridiculous one-click-purchase patent up his sleeves, what gives? BTW that abominable patent finally expires this year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah, nobody I know has any idea what Amazon is because they don't drive past brick and mortar stores.
I knew what a sears catalog was before I had been to a sears
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I got back from a trip to Asia and bought an unlocked Nokia N-80 I had seen advertised there, which at the time was pretty cutting edge. Within something like 2 months of purchasing of the Nokia, the iPhone came out and Nokia got left in the dust - permanently. They never really recovered. Nokia made a lot of half-hearted attempts to compete with Apple but the whole "touch screen thing" seemed to be something they never really grasped and Nokia would, at best, hold onto the "garbage phone" market for a while in the 3rd world where their cheapish "I want a phone that's only phone" low featured models would continue to sell in decent numbers for a while.
For those of us old enough to remember, Ken Olsen laughed at IBM, and the PC makers laughed at him (and don't forget Wang).
...to buy Lisas back then...NOT!!!
A number of organizations want to deliver groceries. But delivery isn't free. Especially for produce and frozen products! My understanding is that groceries is typically a real low-margin proposition anyway, and that's leaving the last mile to the customer. Except for Whole Foods. It's high price, which I expect means high margin -- a good place to hide delivery costs. AND everyone who shops there has demonstrated the willingness to pay high prices for groceries if you can find the reason that trips their trigger.
It was an insightful acquisition.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores.
Indeed. If anyone was positioned to stop Amazon, it was Barnes&Noble, not Sears. B&N could have stopped them while Amazon was still books-only. But there was too much internal resistance from store owners afraid of cannibalizing brick-and-mortar sales, so B&N's website sucked and they never had a coherent strategy until it was too late.
I can only think of old man like Trump and any other baby boomer. They are unwilling to think about the future, as it doesn't concern "them", since they'll be long dead
Funny that the Apple iPhone "Story" has been hyped the last month.
Palm had better productivity and huge reliability/usability (i.e. battery life to this day).
What Apple did was market the heck out of the iPhone that RIM couldn't match. And with the sales proceeds aside from all the complaints compared to a BB by millions of business users, that bought Apple time to refine the iPod-ness, apps, and integration into business apps. They couldn't do it day one and compete against RIM, they had to out market them, which is what they did.
Hence how marketing is extremely important. And with the iPhone history hype today proves it in order to fight Samsung/Qualcomm.
I knew what a sears catalog was before I had been to a sears
Last-resort fapping material? :-P
Or if you're REALLY old, a source of toilet paper?
This article may be useful for what it tells *us* about how to interpret statements by CEO's, but it makes the mistake of treating a CEO's statement as some objective analytical statement that's meant to stand the test of time like something out of a university. CEO's are never trying to speak "truth". They are always pushing their company's agenda. So when TFA says, "The similarities go deeper, though: both Colligan and Mackey made the same analytical mistakes", the article's author is misunderstanding the CEO's purpose.
In both cases, the CEO's may have fully understood the threat these new developments posed for their companies. But it is their job to nevertheless do what they can to fight against them. So it is a *marketing* statement to claim a new competitor faces difficult hurdles. Who knows if they really will. But the CEO has to try to make it more true by saying it is true. It almost never serves their interest to say a new competitor is a real threat. That would likely just hasten any demise the CEO's company might be facing.
Carbon-Dioxide is not "Plant Food". CO2 is needed for plants to respirate and metabolize their food. Their food is: Nitrogen (not in air, in soil), Phosphorous, and Potassium. They also need sufficient light-energy in order to use their food and air. Loading up the atmosphere with CO2 does not magically put more NPK in the soil. In fact, P is something we will soon run out of at current population growth levels. Their are only a few Phosphorous mines in the world. Once they run out, food production will plunge world-wide and 3/4 of the population will be wiped out.
I liked that joke much better in the briefer Orginal Twitterese.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning
I had an app in the initial App Store. To me it was obvious this was always planned, because the app store opened almost one year to the day after the iPhone launched, and the thing to remember is that meant you had to be able to let developers build app for that store beforehand... if I remember right it was about 5-6 months before the app store opened that we got the first official SDK from Apple.
So that means if Apple did not plan to have an App Store to begin with, in just around six months they had to prepare all of the documentation and toking for external use, and in around a year had to build the infrastructure and UI for an entire app store...
Come on. Do you honestly think any of that could be done in such a short timeframe? No. The truth is they couldn't launch with an App Store because it was not quite ready, but it had always been planned to have one far in advance or none the significant app signing infrastructure to make that all possible would have been in place at launch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We must have different definitions of worse, at least for the CEO. Getting bought out by a megacorp sounds like a way better ending than getting left in the dust and ultimately forgotten.
you jest....
Famously, though, there was no support for Flash, which was a major burden back then; YouTube didn't work.
Humans seem to have a natural tendency to fail to accept the obvious realty that THINGS CHANGE! Some people will literally laugh about their belief an event can't possibly happen because it has never happened in their experience (volcanic eruption, rise of personal computers, riot, rise of air travel, earthquake, tsunami, etc) AS it occurs around them. And even when we do try to estimate future events we often are wildly incorrect at the way things will go (pickup an old version of popular mechanics or watch some old sci-fi films).
You're just agreeing with the other guy; how can you not see this?
You're saying it was necessary, but not sufficient.
If a new idea is obvious, someone else will have tried and failed.
Real innovation almost always is surprisingly simplistic after it is done, but totally unthinkable before it is done.
Which is why the old guard thought the new guard would fail, they had no concept of the new guard's new idea.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Amazon just acquired Whole Foods, it seems to be jumping the gun to act like its success in the grocery sector is assured. Time will tell.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." --Western Union internal memo, 1876
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
So, Palm dismisses Apple. Apple iPhone drives Palm out of business.
Whole Foods dismisses Amazon. Amazon buys Whole Foods.
Sounds like Whole Foods turned out to be a necessary solution, unlike Palm. I don't think there is a good analogy between Palm and Whole Foods.
... just remember these are the proactive guys.
End-users are way more depressing...
Don't take public statements by CEOs too literally. Anything they say in public is directed at investors. What kind of CEO is going to say in public, "I don't think we can compete, Apple/Amazon/whoever is going to come in and crush us?" Even if they're really worried, they have to sound confident to keep up the stock price. And then (if they're good), they make plans for how they'll either try to compete or, if that doesn't work, sell out to the giant company instead.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I always remember the CTO of Motorola, and her condescending dismissal, of the iPhone after it was announced: http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
I live in Seattle, and Amazon is basically dead to me. They want to be everything to everyone, yet I don't see a single thing I need them for, so they are nothing to me. Of course I have ordered products on Amazon before, I spend maybe up to $1,000 per year, but called it quits after I got tired of unstable prices and irregular product quality. It's just way easier for me to drive to Target and buy everything myself. I know roughly what the products will cost and won't be surprised by a $10 swing like I have seen on Amazon for a normally $20 item.
Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores. Without brick and mortar stores everyone forgets who Seers is. So its a catch22. They were doomed from the beginning.
As Kodak learned, you cannibalize your own market if you can, otherwise somebody else will do it for you.
They've only just announced the purchase. We have yet to see what they do with it. It isn't yet time for back patting nor "I told you so's".
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07... .COM bubble.
And anyone remember around 2000, wholefoods.COM (grocery deliveries). And idea too early and sadly timed with the
Maybe grocery will be Bezos' Waterloo. If Amazon is reduced to a Yahoo! fire!sale! in the future then who was right? Over 90% of food related new business fail. Even established ones can turn bad overnight.
> Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores.
Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenny's were already catalog stores where many physical locations were glorified show rooms or a place to pick up something you ordered from the catalog.
They were a different beast to begin with. They thrived, struggled, or DIED because they forgot this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The thing we learned today is that hindsight is 20/20.
People have got some ideas right and some ideas wrong. As long as the ones that where right bring in more money than those that where were wrong, they are visionaries.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Of course, the ultimate unwillingness to foresee the future is the unwillingness to see that temps will be +4C by 2100 or so, at which time there will be no more food growing at all, organic or otherwise, and no more Amazon to distribute anything.
In the meantime we can order organic produce and have it delivered by drone! Fun times while the world burns.