Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
He doesn't have private equity origins as far as I know. He came from DE Shaw, a very well respected and long running hedge fund.
Evidence suggests that maybe they were. "Focusing" obviously didn't work.
But at the end of the day, it was private equity and the hubris of a CEO who wasn't nearly as clever as he'd like to have thought he was.
To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.
I haven't tested these warranties since Craftsman was sold to Black and Decker, but when it was still owned by Sears I almost exclusively bought Craftsman tools as a result of their wonderful warranties.
Maybe not quite as hassle free as in years past, but I found the experience acceptable enough.
I bought a hydraulic press. It was missing bolts, has already been assembled before.
A friend bough some wheel Dollie's the threads on the castors were stripped out.
People buy things and use them once for their project, then return them.
But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.
I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.
And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.
(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.
He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.
So that's what we did.
She took the receipt and gave him his money back.
Good 'nuff.)
This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003742/http://characterl...
today is the first time I heard of sears and the comment about the sears towers and ibm literally gave me goosebumps.
A16Z once talked about the scars of being too early causes investors/companies to get fixed that an idea will never work. Then some new younger people who never got burned will try the same idea and things will work.
Prodigy and the Faminet probably fall into that bucket along with a lot of early internet companies where they tried things early, got burned and then possibly were too late to capitalise when it was finally the right time for the idea to flourish
A true shame to see how he's completely lost track with Tesla, the competition particularly from China is eating them alive. And in space, it's a matter of years until the rest of the world catches up.
And now, he's ran out of tricks - and more importantly, on public support. He can't pivot any more, his entire brand is too toxic to touch.
I remember that one time we tried to drastically limit Japanese imports to protect the American car industry, which basically created the Lexus LS400, one of the best cars ever made.
Similar to how Sears didn't put their catalog online in the 90's because putting it online on Prodigy failed so badly in the 80's.
They literally killed their catalog sales right when they should have been ramping up and putting it online. They could easily have beat out Amazon for everything other than books.
But I guess in startup culture, one has to die trying the idea of right time, as sure one can do surveys to feel like it, but the only way we can ever find if its the right time is the users feedback when its lauched / over time.
What you're arguing is that AI is fundamentally going to be a utility, and while that's worth a floor of cash, it's not what investors or the market clamor for.
I agree though, it's fundamentally a utility, which means theres more value in proper government authority than private interests.