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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ...

Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke.

Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed?

The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announced it totally did seem like a prank. You're offering how much storage for free? for everyone? How?.

View on HN

And why is this a standalone site and not inside the Amazon.com portfolio?

EDIT:

JustWalkout.com was registered anonymously at GoDaddy 7 years ago: https://www.whois.com/whois/justwalkout.com

Amazon.com has public DNS contact info: https://www.whois.com/whois/amazon.com

There's no TM or R marks around the term "Just Walk Out" on the page and no Favicon.

Are we sure this is real?

Huh, that actually looks kinda suspicious. Reuters has an article up [1] quoting an amazon VP about the launch, so it seems like the info is legit.

But i don't see any link to this justwalkout.com from anywhere on amazon.com, justwalkout doesn't pull in any content hosted on amazon.com, the reuters article doesn't reference it, and all the other tech blogs talking about this seem to just be referencing the reuters article.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-store-technolo...

If it wasn't legit, amazon would have already released a statement denying it. You'd then be reading about it here...

Well the SSL certificate was issued by Amazon.

As is pbs.org, or nasa.gov, or a bunch of other CloudFront websites that are only connected to Amazon because they use AWS.

It's possible someone at Amazon is just gauging interest as they do with their test press releases and one pagers. They may or may not move forward based on how much interest they get (i.e. serious emails)

Their SSL certificate was issued by Amazon. So it seems legit.

GMail solved a thorny problem: convince users to browse the web while logged in, preferably with their real life identity. To then collect and aggregate an extensive personalized dossier of their online activity without any fear of legal repercussions. This is priceless.

Then just play the trends: how much space the median user actually uses, user adoption trends, planned storage capacity, storage cost. Possibly the whole GMail never used more than 1% of of Google's total storage capacity.

That may have been an upside, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the plan at the time. I don't think Google had the notion of "user accounts" before GMail was launched. I think the plan was more likely "serve ads via search engine results, but for email."

That's precisely the point. GMail gave Google user accounts, which made the cost largely immaterial.

The 24/7 global corporate surveillance network has it's roots in Sun and its "The Network is the Computer", as early as 1984. Hard to believe Google just stumbled into a trillion dollar business model two decades later.

I'm not saying Google isn't evil, but I don't buy this particular piece of conspiracy theory. Every major browser including Google Chrome is starting to phase out third-party cookies, which prevents exactly that kind of tracking.

When you own the browser you don’t need cookies anymore.

Just a couple of years ago, Google was one of the major tech companies who were strenuously defending the use of third-party cookies. They're shifting to eliminating them (someday) solely because they were forced to. The other major browsers were committed to doing it, and it became clear that this could pose a threat to the dominance of Chrome if Chrome didn't follow suit.

But at the same time, Google (as well as the rest of the marketing industry) is working on replacing the functionality of third party cookies without having to use them -- thus negating the entire reason to restrict third party cookies.

Except that Google can essentially track individual Chrome installations and all the activity that happens on that, so blocking third party cookies doesn't necessarily mean that Google can't track you...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA

14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.

I was with you until that last line. Maybe it's because I never saw IBM in its prime or because I only happen to hear about IBM when there's a ton of media spin on a product that never shows up as anything more than a gimmick (IBM has 5nm chips in 2017!!! Look at Watson!). I just don't find laughing at IBM to be that far-fetched of a concept.

AT&T You Will ad from 1993 on grocery shopping...

https://youtu.be/AdDC-8179hw

> Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke.

Twenty years ago, "Just walk out" technology in grocery stores looked more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrwjiO1MCVs

Not sure if I would've viewed it as a prank. Maybe some ambitious plan involving physical RFID tags, that was doomed to fail.

Yeah with all the innovation it indeed seems like we are living in a fairy tale. 20 years ago it would be impossible to think that you can order stuff from an unknown location/seller using a piece of glass. And soon we'll have drones coming to our house with packages.

20 years ago was the year 2000. Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995.

Also: imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up. That's a catalog, and Sears was making them in the late 1800s. I bet there are older examples.

> imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box

And then, later, we could also order by phone and credit card, just giving our card number over the phone (since we didn't expect to be dealing with or be surrounded by assholes, like nowadays on the IoA) and getting the items after a few days (since the standard Post was better organised than the pitiful mess it has become now).

> imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up.

And suddenly I'm reminded of If all stories were written like science fiction stories

https://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrove...

> 20 years ago it would be impossible to think that you can order stuff from an unknown location/seller using a piece of glass.

FYI 20 years ago the total yearly e-commerce trade sales accounted for $27B in the US alone [1].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185283/total-and-e-comme...

People were thinking of that in the late 90s. During the dot com bubble people were predicting the end of physical retail stores and people leaving their house to shop. A few years later people were predicting the end of printed materials.

If I set aside the 'unknown seller', which is not really unknown: Mid 80's, France: order something with your Minitel (terminal available free of charge) from any of the major mail-order companies, get it delivered in 48 hours.

> 20 years ago it would be impossible to think that you can order stuff from an unknown location/seller using a piece of glass.

Except for the fact that you could actually do this 20 years ago.

LOL. At first, I thought you were trashing their website. ... "cause these days, tech giants put way more energy into their April's fools day jokes than Amazon put into this website."

Also, that name, OMG, there are going to be so many protest signs that use this.

Well and try to Google "Amazon walkout" and all you find will be this site. Smart move!