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'The Unwillingness To Foresee The Future' (stratechery.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-they-think dept.

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.

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. I've worked with man in ex-Palm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  2. Mail-order catalogs by sinij · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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).

    1. Re:Mail-order catalogs by CWCheese · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First sentence is very insightful. Amazon has essentially refreshed the Sears Catalog business to a level that Sears itself eschewed when it's clueless managers shutdown catalog operations just at the dawn of the web commerce age. Had their management been a little foreseeing, they might have leveraged the web to combine with their, at that time, peerless consumer distribution network around the country. Instead they blundered along while Jeff Bezos went from being a cheapest books seller to seller of everything imaginable. By the way, Sears Holdings is closing several hundred stores a quarter and likely will not be a corporation by end of 2018, if not sooner.

      --
      Have a Day!
  3. He's right! by slashdice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
    1. Re:He's right! by vakuona · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem with all of those examples is that they were "me too". Perhaps with the exception of Drugstore.com. Even then, that wasn't really taking advantage of what Amazon really is.

      If you read the article, Amazon is about scale. Whole Foods gives Amazon scale that is doesn't have in the grocery business and allows it to build out a delivery infrastructure (surely its end game) to support that scale and beyond.

      Amazon presents itself as the world's shopping site, but Amazon is really a logistics company. And logistics companies need scale.

    2. Re:He's right! by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      btw fruit quality isn't so much about "local" vs "non-local" although that does have an effect. When you pick fruits commercially, you pick them all at once. So you have to pick them at the moment the average fruit is ripe. But you don't want a bunch of overripe fruit, so in fact you pick them before the average fruit is ripe.

      Farmers markets can pick them in smaller quantities and thus can focus on only picking the ripe ones at a particular time.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. Anyone who tells you they can see the future by elrous0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...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.
  5. Re:Mod parent DOWN by Altus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  6. Re:Not a fair comparison by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I also think it's not fair to single out Palm in the example of the iPhone. I was working in the mobile industry at the time, and the iPhone caught everyone off guard. One day, the Motorola Q and Razr phones were hot shit. Blackberry owned the business smartphone market, but Palm was still in the game. The next day, everyone wanted an iPhone.

    One of the big miscalculations was that people hadn't realized how long Apple had been working on the iPhone. They were thinking, "Apple thinks they can just start working on a phone now, and have a working product in the next year?!" Few people had been paying enough attention to realize that the iPhone had been in development for about 10 years.

    There was another big miscalculation, but I don't know exactly how to characterize it. Basically, the incumbent vendors thought they were doing a great job. They'd make a new version of the same old device, but it was slightly thinner. They put out the same phone with a slightly higher resolution screen, or a screen that could display more colors. Palm made the glyphs that you had to learn to write with their stylus just a little easier to write. They were tinkering around the edges because it was easy and cheap, and didn't require anyone to be particularly innovative. They thought they were the smartest people around, and because these products were the best they could do, they were the best anyone could do. It's just a thing that happens in entrenched markets, when people get comfortable.