'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.

Comments

Re:He's right!

[bluefoxlucid]

Whole Foods? "Yeah our customers are delusional, retarded hipsters with too much money and not enough brains to realize we're fucking them" Whole Foods? The company whose upper management actually announced that, yes, their business model is basically "sell to morons at inflated prices"?

It has a halo it found in a crackerjack box. They're marketing pseudoscientific bullshit like localism, organic farming, anti-GMO sentiment, and everything. If only they would expand to Whole Foods medicine; the anti-vaxxer crowd fits comfortably next to the same sort of mindless idiots who make up the anti-GMO movement (not the anti-Monsanto movement, but the ones who think GMO is somehow dangerous for simply being tampered with).