Hacker News Reader

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon.

That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

View on HN

I mean, GM came kinda close with the EV1. It was essentially as good as a Nissan Leaf was, in the 90s! It was more of an organizational failure than a technical one that killed it.

Sears did have an internet store on Prodigy (an AOL competitor) in the early 90s it went nowhere... a lot of these megacompanies weren't going to turn it around even if they were first movers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com