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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

This is the canonical eulogy for Sears, courtesy of Pastabagel@Metafilter:

https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

"By my estimates, Sears could have spent about $200 million in 1994-1996 to develop and promote retailing and financial services online, and they'd be reaping billions.

Sears could still be a huge American company today, instead of a historical footnote."

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But then again, where are all the early search engine companies now? Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Lycos... Just because you are early in a market doesn't mean you will succeed.

Yeah, but if you are early and you have capital, you've got a major market advantage. You'd have to seriously stumble somewhere in your execution, and having capital makes that easier to fix more quickly while being early means you're better able to drive and read the market. For a company like Sears whose name was largely built on their mail order catalog business, the fact that they'd die to competition from online retailers is pretty ironic.

They gave away this market by killing the mail order business in the late 90s. That's the entire thesis of the link I posted.

Sure, Sears would have lost some ground to online retail at the start, but with a massive warehouse and distribution network already in place they could have made up the lost ground very very quickly.

I feel the real missing ingredient here was the foresight required to anticipate a lot of these changes looking forward.

It's something I've been trying to develop myself. Any idiot can look back and say, gee, they could've done this, that, and the other thing, with benefit of hindsight.

How do you become the sort of person who sees where things are going, years/decades in advance?

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a good read for more information on this topic. In fact one of the examples/case studies focuses on Sears and how the were nearly taken down by discount retailing.

The book can be found on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Man...

again? Sears was already mayor investor in Prodigy since 1984, finally getting rid of it in 1996. Cant find it right now, but there is a clip on YT from some breakfast/morning TV show where presenters shop around dialed into Prodigy system presenting variety of Sears catalog items.

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