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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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
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
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).
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 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
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.