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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.
GMO and Organic are not a dichotomy.
Solving the problem of adequate nutrition for an ever-rising population will still result in Malthusian catastrophe. At some point, no amount of science will be able to feed the number of mouths with the available resources, and of course nature will step in to make the demise sudden with some natural disaster or global-warming-induced disaster.
Evangelize ZPG, it's really our only hope.
Bruce Perens.
How can anyone support organic food?
Vaccines cause autism etc. etc. Do you really need to ask?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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
Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
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>Organic wastes more water and energy per kilo of crop yield.
How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
By the same measure, rain wastes far more water than agriculture ever did.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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!
Organic food is evil.
So is meat eating but vegetarianism doesn't have a massive foothold. Three of your four qualifiers can be made just as easily about the farm factory culture and even "free range" to a lessor extent but the masses aren't going to be won over by those facts.
The market isn't based on what you think makes sense but what people are willing to consume.
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! --
Monsanto and others like them have "poisoned the well" of GMO/science based foods. Monsanto based GMO corn has contaminated nearly all corn DNA with an inherent pesticide that 10% of people have violent allergies to, and maybe 40% have GI upset with... The practice of hozing down wheat with Roundup (a Monsanto product) that started in 2000 is likely the root cause of the massive spike in Celiac and Celiac like symptoms (maybe also IBS). The problem is that the FDA needs to start treating GMO like it treats drugs, with long periods of clinical trials and testing to ensure that any changes in the DNA of our food, or the chemicals in it when it arrives at the table are a net positive for humans.
The problem with GMO is it can have dire repercussions for the consumer and since it's inception has been targeted exclusively at improving profit margins instead of quality and nutrition. We may very well see the end of Wheat and Corn as large scale commercial food products thanks to GMO/Monsanto. People don't like getting stomach cramps, and if they can go gluten free and avoid them, they don't know or care that it is actually the Roundup residual in the wheat, rather than the Gluten, they just know they feel better.
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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).
Just ask all the Central Valley farmers who didn't get their water allocation when the reservoirs ran low.
Plants make water cease to exist all the time, when they strip the hydrogens from it to stick on the sugars they're making. Animals do it to make sugars into fats. And when I get fresh fruits shipped from (dry) California to the (wet) eastern US, that water isn't staying in the California ecosystem. That said, it is a little ridiculous when I have to have low-flow showerheads and toilets designed for near-desert climates when my local supply is from abundant surface water.
Good thing we keep adding plant food to the atmosphere.
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've always wondered the same, actually... I mean, it's entirely possible to outpace the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle, but that water isn't disappearing, it's just not returning to a usable state as quickly as some would like.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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
Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
"Organic" produce use both fertilizers and pesticides, they just have to be derived from natural sources
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.
How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
A lot of the water used to grow crops in the deserts of California and the like comes from wells, rather than surface water. Depending on the aquifer, and how deep it is, it can take millennia to replenish those stocks, if they ever will replenish. Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well. Yes, a lot of the water used in irrigation comes from surface water sources, but aquifer depletion is a real problem as well.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The flip side is that we (as humans) have been genetically modifying our crops since the advent of agriculture.
As far as your argument regarding Roundup and Wheat, I'm pretty sure you're incorrect with that. Monsanto lists Corn, Soybean, Sorghum, Canola, Alfalfa, Cotton, and Sugar Beets as being currently available with the "Roundup Ready" modification. Wheat is still in development.
I actually don't know how good of a candidate that wheat, and the other grains, really are for the mod anyways. Modern cultivation techniques plant the seeds so densely that the wheat will pretty much choke out/shade any weeds that might be present.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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
Sorry but asking stupid farmers that decide to farm a freaking desert is not who I will ask.
I'll ask the ones that had brains and picked a fertile and resource strong area to farm instead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
>Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well.
And it's the farms that are using the water right? So they are the one's responsible for their own demise.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
"Organic" produce use both fertilizers and pesticides, they just have to be derived from natural sources
And your point is?
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"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!
The environmental damage due to farming is proportional to the amount of food grown. Modern farming just concentrates that. Better than cutting down all the forests to get enough farmland IMO.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Do yourself a favor and look up "aquifer". Much of the water used in agriculture comes from underground aquifers that have been storing water for tens of thousands of years. Annual rainfall replaces but a tiny percentage of that.
So they shouldn't be extracting more than a tiny percentage of the aquifer contents if they want the aquifer contents to remain at existing levels. However rather than being 'wasted', using that water more fits the definition of being put to use.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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...
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.
> 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.
You are incorrect on both counts. Selective breeding (which I assume is what you are referring to) is completely different than GMO. Selective breeding takes genes that already exist in the plant and amplifies them. You can get a bigger apple, an apple with higher sugar content, different color, but you will never get a fig, it is still an apple, and still has the same compounds in it. This is completely different than GMO. You will never get a new kind of crop with selective breeding. On the other hand, GMO is, for example, splicing in completely different genes (like the natural pesticide found in one plant) into another plant (like Corn) creating a genetically unique new kind of plant that has compounds that did not exist in the original crop.
Regarding the Roundup, it kills grass, including wheat. In around the year 2000 Monsanto began to market/sell Roundup to wheat farmers to increase their yield by hozing down the wheat near harvest time to kill it and make all the wheat harvestable at the same time. Only problem is that it is scientific fact that a significant amount of Roundup ends up in the wheat grain using this process which is now illegal in Europe and may have also been banned by this point in time by the FDA. Unlike when Roundup is used to kill weeds around crops that do not it up, Wheat does the exact opposite.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like