> I think you were in a pretty distinct milieu if you thought this was a popular idea in 1992, or any time before, say, 1998.
It wasn’t mainstream before people could afford computers and connectivity but nobody serious was laughing at the idea for the reasons I mentioned: it was an obvious extension of what businesses had been doing for over a century and there was tons of prior art (services like CompuServ had online shopping in the 80s). By the mid-90s it was obvious that it was going to happen for easily shipped items as soon as people got online - when Amazon launched in 1995 it had customers around the country almost immediately and the book operation was profitable within a couple of years.
> Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular.
Our customers weren’t tech companies but brick and mortar retail, banks, manufacturers, etc. They knew that this was an easy way to sell direct to customers - which cut out some hefty margins charged by major stores & catalogs - and try new products. The opportunity was obvious even to people who weren’t in the industry — absolutely nobody was laughing at that, although there were dotcoms of the “lose money on every sale, make it up in volume” persuasion who everyone knew were doomed.
It wasn’t mainstream before people could afford computers and connectivity but nobody serious was laughing at the idea for the reasons I mentioned: it was an obvious extension of what businesses had been doing for over a century and there was tons of prior art (services like CompuServ had online shopping in the 80s). By the mid-90s it was obvious that it was going to happen for easily shipped items as soon as people got online - when Amazon launched in 1995 it had customers around the country almost immediately and the book operation was profitable within a couple of years.
> Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular.
Our customers weren’t tech companies but brick and mortar retail, banks, manufacturers, etc. They knew that this was an easy way to sell direct to customers - which cut out some hefty margins charged by major stores & catalogs - and try new products. The opportunity was obvious even to people who weren’t in the industry — absolutely nobody was laughing at that, although there were dotcoms of the “lose money on every sale, make it up in volume” persuasion who everyone knew were doomed.