I liked this one:
Quote:
|
Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
|
I ordered a pair of LeakFrogs from Woot! a couple of days back (water heater worries). I've been shopping for a new graphics tablet. I just bought a stack of ebooks, now snugly tucked away on my Sony Reader, in a matter of minutes. I remember the last time I bought airline tickets offline; it was 1998. I've never physically met a lot of my customers (and hadn't in 1998, when I was in a different business, for that matter). What's interesting is not that I bought this stuff -- there's a reason Amazon.com is highly profitable -- but what I was thinking as I bought it: Thank heavens I don't have to endure some idiot trying to read the box to me. I get frustrated in physical stores because I can't look up the specs of an item, and I'm reduced to what's on the box or the sign. No reviews, no discussions, just the box, and the minimum-wage "salesperson" who never got the Radio Shack memo about "be a salesmaker, not an order-taker."
What's funny isn't so much that he got things wrong, but
why he got things wrong. He looked at the world of 1995 and assumed, for no historically valid reason, that that world would continue forever. That's what you get when people don't read enough history. They assume what they see around them has always existed and will always exist. It is what it is. Except, of course, it isn't.
There have always been people who didn't get it. There were people who said cars would never replace horses. There were people who said nobody would want to hear a movie actor talk. There were people who said heavier-than-air flight would never get off the ground. There were people who said TV was a pathetic imitation of radio. There were people who said no private individual could possibly have a use for a computer. There were people who said ... well, just about anything that could be proved wrong a decade later (or a matter of months, in the case of Ken Olsen).
"Of what use is a baby?" -- Michael Faraday