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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

In the 1997, Amazon's proposition of "Online retailer" was also pretty far fetched. It wasn't obvious that their model was going to make them one of the largest retailers in the world.

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Online retailers wasn't far-fetched at all. It wasn't obvious they were going to become the everything store and dominate the market, but it wasn't like people were perplexed by a business plan of selling books online and sending them to consumers.

If people are perplexed by uber today it's because the unit economics look horrible, and it doesn't seem like they will improve without a major technological advance.

Edit: TBF, I was curious so I checked out AMZN's first year of trading: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/history?period1=8528832...

They dropped 20% on day one. I don't think that reflects investor skepticism re: shopping online, but skepticism re: the myriad risks they faced as one of many money losing online retailers.

Even with a major technical advance it's not obvious that they'll have a moat to defend their margins. All of the ride sharing platforms might just end up competing to the death on price without anything else to differentiate on, and in that future I'd imagine the person with the cheapest supply chain will win, and I don't see why that would be Uber.

It wasn't farfetched, everyone had the same idea, there were dozens of online retailers that IPO'd in those years. Amazon was just better managed so it was one of the few that survived the dotcom crash.

They also started with selling media, which is the perfect industry to get people comfortable with shopping online as quality is nearly assured.

Right. At the time, I thought Sears would dominate that business. They had the big-catalog fulfillment thing down, and had for a century. All they needed to do was take it online. But Sears gave up on general mail order in 1993, when they discontinued their huge print catalog. They thought WalMart and the malls had won.

I duno, buying stuff online seemed like the way of the future at the time IMO. When, how much and etc was just a matter of timing.

The idea of "people won't buy things they can't judge by holding it in their hands" was still strong back then. That's why Amazon was successful selling books where quality was trusted implicitly without that physical judgment being necessary.

TechCrunch did a good job looking back at Amazon's IPO and it's a good read to clarify what Amazon was when it went public (a bookseller, not general retail), how insane its growth was (revenue up about 3,000% YoY from 1996 to 1997, more revenue in the quarter before its IPO than the entire previous year), and how fast the IPO came together (12 days to S-1). Even for all that growth, revenue was still around $15M. It was a minnow but it played all of its cards about as right as it could for an IPO.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/28/a-look-back-at-amazons-199...

Doesn't ride sharing seem like the way of the future in your opinion?

Who's doing ride sharing? Certainly not Uber

> Uber Technologies Inc. is a transportation network company (TNC) offering services that include peer-to-peer ridesharing, ride service hailing, food delivery, and a bicycle-sharing system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber

Not necessarily.

So is gig economy. Jobs will continue to decline.

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