'The Unwillingness To Foresee The Future' (stratechery.com) 193
An anonymous reader shares a few excerpts from Ben Thompson's analysis: Back in 2006, when the iPhone was a mere rumor, Palm CEO Ed Colligan was asked if he was worried: "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." What if Steve Jobs' company did bring an iPod phone to market? Well, it would probably use WiFi technology and could be distributed through the Apple stores and not the carriers like Verizon or Cingular, Colligan theorized." I was reminded of this quote after Amazon announced an agreement to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; after all, it was only two years ago that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey predicted that groceries would be Amazon's Waterloo. And while Colligan's prediction was far worse -- Apple simply left Palm in the dust, unable to compete -- it is Mackey who has to call Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Napoleon of this little morality play, boss. The similarities go deeper, though: both Colligan and Mackey made the same analytical mistakes: they mis-understood their opponents' goals, strategies, and tactics.
I've worked with man in ex-Palm (Score:2, Insightful)
And the managers were total dipshits. A combination of arrogant and uninformed, and after Palm many of them continue to lay waste to start-ups in the valley. Idiots almost ruined the Kindle project at Amazon, until Seattle descended down upon them and started re-educating and cleaning house.
Re:I've worked with man in ex-Palm (Score:4, Interesting)
I had to exit at this quote:
Apple’s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them.
I disagree here, this is hindsight and speculative, and the provided link is from 2013. The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning to pan out the way it did.
I am not trying to play down the success of the iPhone and how it has changed the world. Yes, it was incredibly successful, yes it all panned out nicely. I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning, or maybe there were some decisions made after initial success and someone came up with even better ideas. Steve Jobs touched junk liberally.
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I have to agree with this. Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but I'm sure the initial vision was for no apps at all. Everything would be built as webpages/webapps for Safari.
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Yep but here is the kicker Safari in the original iPhone could load regular web pages and not dumbed downed ignored websites that most mobile use was limited to.
For the first two iPhones apps didn't matter as you had full websites to access.
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The problem was carriers data speeds and prices were crippling the iphone's abilities. AT&T utterly sucked loading any kind of web page on an iphone 1, jobs realized that he had to also fight the phone carriers as they refused to upgrade their data speeds, so a different direction was taken and it created a whole new industry.
So basically you can credit AT&T and their utterly shitty data speeds and prices for creating the phone app industry.
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but apps were not the necessary component to the iPhone disrupting the industry, having a full featured web browser was sufficient.
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>My Curve had a full featured browser
But most users had employer provided BlackBerries and you couldn't run shit on an employer provided BlackBerry other than the mail client. The iPhone was perfectly timed to get everyone in every corporation from middle managers upwards to say "screw it, I'm buying my own iPhone", simply out of frustration at not being able to run useful applications like maps and browsers, not because they didn't exist, but because the phone was locked down.
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I don't think it was the browser; it was almost certainly something else, you're just not looking closely enough. You even just alluded to it yourself.
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but apps were not the necessary component to the iPhone disrupting the industry, having a full featured web browser was sufficient.
Not really. A native app is way more responsive and featureful compared to a webapp. Many key features like tilt, shake gestures, and camera integration don't work in a webapp without a callback to the "real" app underneath. WebGL is crap compared to real OpenGL, and it was much worse back in 2007.
Slick native apps were a big part of why the iPhone was successful. They were NOT part of the original plan, but at least Steve had the sense to pivot rapidly once he saw the potential.
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Don't get me wrong, I agree that apps are key these days and provide a much better option than web pages on these phones, but back then feature phones were absolute garbage by comparison, technically you could connect to the internet but the reality was you couldn't get most of the data you wanted. With an iphone, you could. The internet is a hell of a killer app.
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There were PDA-phones that had full-featured web browsers before the iPhone. I remember when it first came out, it was nowhere near as useful as the Palm Treo 650 I had at the time. It had a full-featured browser, and it could also copy and paste and download files, which the iPhone couldn't when it was first released.
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It didn't come with a market but the phone app was a small part of the overall appeal. Maps and music were there as was the most important thing at the time, a fully functioning web browser. As someone who used mobile web on those old feature phones the difference was night and day, there didnt have to be an app if you could get to the data you needed in the browser... sure, it was rough, mobile websites were crappy and desktop sites didnt work ideally on a small screen, but it was worlds better than anyt
A market was always planned (Score:5, Informative)
The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning
I had an app in the initial App Store. To me it was obvious this was always planned, because the app store opened almost one year to the day after the iPhone launched, and the thing to remember is that meant you had to be able to let developers build app for that store beforehand... if I remember right it was about 5-6 months before the app store opened that we got the first official SDK from Apple.
So that means if Apple did not plan to have an App Store to begin with, in just around six months they had to prepare all of the documentation and toking for external use, and in around a year had to build the infrastructure and UI for an entire app store...
Come on. Do you honestly think any of that could be done in such a short timeframe? No. The truth is they couldn't launch with an App Store because it was not quite ready, but it had always been planned to have one far in advance or none the significant app signing infrastructure to make that all possible would have been in place at launch.
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I don't know how likely it is, but it IS actually plausible for Apple to have done such a thing. They had an API for writing their own apps, they probably took code liberally from iTunes in order to set up the store, and initial volume would've been really low. Legend has it that Jobs really was actually counting on webapps for everything.
I've also heard that they took the iPod from zero to a product in considerably less than a year. Apple of that era would sometimes just turn on a dime and DO stuff.
To be c
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Come on. Do you honestly think any of that could be done in such a short timeframe? No. The truth is they couldn't launch with an App Store because it was not quite ready, but it had always been planned to have one far in advance or none the significant app signing infrastructure to make that all possible would have been in place at launch.
There is also the possibility that they hadn't worked out all the details with AT&T yet. Remember, at this time, phone apps were pretty expensive and only available from the carriers who had a hold on them. Apple shows up and needs to get that bit away from the carriers, so they simply announces, websites are the apps, which while not perfect, would have been a workable solution, more workable than letting AT&T keep controlling apps. Faced with that, Apple might have been using it to leverage variou
Re: A market was always planned (Score:2)
At the time there have been perfectly usable smartphones where you could install any appication compiled for the platform, independent of the telco provider and you also could write your own. I did not get the whole iphone hype back then, and I still don't.
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At the time there have been perfectly usable smartphones where you could install any appication compiled for the platform, independent of the telco provider and you also could write your own. I did not get the whole iphone hype back then, and I still don't.
A bit of history glossing, methinks. Yes, it was *possible* to run third party apps, but the experience couldn't have been more dissimilar.
It was possible to download CAB files (and the Palm equivalent) from whatever download.com or tucows or softpedia clone you wanted, but there was no guarantee it would really work with your phone. Alternatively, you could walk into Staples and buy an app on an SD card, which cost between $10 and $30, and likely needed to occupy your one SD card slot, on a phone that *mig
Re:I've worked with man in ex-Palm (Score:4, Interesting)
Big Success in the tech market is usually 75% luck. 20% Hard work, and 5% skill.
Palm had a good product at the time, people seem to accept the risks it took using graffiti interface vs. full handwriting recognition (Like apple did on the Newton). It had the features and was priced and had a brand name that was recognizable. Nearly any of these things could had backfired, and Palm wouldn't never had gotten where it got.
However these guys though the numbers were reversed, and they got Palm where it was because they thought they had all these skills. However when they had to go to other work, they really failed, because they were trying to get lucky again. While they were in a more standard market where if you are not lucky you better have more hard work and skill not to win big, but to keep things going.
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Palm had a good product at the time, people seem to accept the risks it took using graffiti interface vs. full handwriting recognition (Like apple did on the Newton). It had the features and was priced and had a brand name that was recognizable. Nearly any of these things could had backfired, and Palm wouldn't never had gotten where it got.
I had a Palm PDA since they were US Robotics to the Palm V. After that, I never saw anything that made me want to trade up. Even after getting a cell phone, I kept looking and kept deciding to keep carrying my Palm V and a cell phone rather than get a newer Palm device (until the iPhone anyway).
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Mail-order catalogs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mail-order catalogs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really, the Sears here is constantly packed. It's huge like an clothing store, furniture store, appliance store, home improvement, hardware store, that does tires and oil changes. They will even deliver your new central air, furnace, stove, washer, dryer, and install it for you.
Re:Mod parent DOWN (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, nobody I know has any idea what Amazon is because they don't drive past brick and mortar stores.
I knew what a sears catalog was before I had been to a sears
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Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores.
Indeed. If anyone was positioned to stop Amazon, it was Barnes&Noble, not Sears. B&N could have stopped them while Amazon was still books-only. But there was too much internal resistance from store owners afraid of cannibalizing brick-and-mortar sales, so B&N's website sucked and they never had a coherent strategy until it was too late.
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Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores. Without brick and mortar stores everyone forgets who Seers is. So its a catch22. They were doomed from the beginning.
As Kodak learned, you cannibalize your own market if you can, otherwise somebody else will do it for you.
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> Going online would have killed the brick and mortar stores.
Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenny's were already catalog stores where many physical locations were glorified show rooms or a place to pick up something you ordered from the catalog.
They were a different beast to begin with. They thrived, struggled, or DIED because they forgot this.
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i think that the buying by Amazon, perhaps irrationally, brings to question the usual business model of whole foods. its not like a typical changing of ownership of a product but the promise of change that HAS? to come because it is now Amazon. The question (speculation) is can Amazon succeed in making whole foods something that is previously been an impulse based brick and mortar experience.
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Amazon business model is a mail order catalog but on Internet.
Maybe for the first 5 years. Today, Amazon's business model is "excel at logistics", and charge a subscription to provide access to that network, for both buyer and seller. They don't need to sell you stuff any more - they're happy if you pay for Prime and only buy from 3rd parties.
Whole Foods is the customer in this story: customer of that logistics network. I'm hoping that we'll also see Whole Foods delivery added to or replacing Amazon Fresh, but that's not really the point IMO. Cutting Whole Foods'
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If anything, what Amazon might do in the grocery space is really "blast from the past" stuff. It's nothing remotely new and everyone else is already doing some form of it better already.
The whole phone thing is a really inappropriate analogy.
It's just the usual hype and nonsense with the news media trying to create the reality rather than just reporting on it.
He's right! (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on Living Social. I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on the Fire Phone. I didn't see the future when Amazon blew all that money on Drugstore.com.
I know some people like to suck Jeff Bezo's dick but there is plenty of failure too.
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Not to mention they just did the acquisition, there's no guarantee they'll fucking be successful at running a brand that caters to upper middle class yuppie/hipster types.. who maybe, just maybe will revolt against the new corporate overlords, since well.. whole foods has a bit more of a halo around it than amazon.
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I agree it caters to a specific type of customer. those people may not look at amazon with the same tint of rose colored glasses is all.
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That's a real thing. Transporting fruits long distances generally involves methods which do bad things to the quality.
Mostly, the localism pitch is about economics; the problem is "buy local" has the same implications as a protectionist strategy, albeit a much smaller poverty-inducing effect.
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Re:He's right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Farmers markets can pick them in smaller quantities and thus can focus on only picking the ripe ones at a particular time.
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You said you like their food. You didn't rant about how GMOs are toxic because genetic sciencification, or rant about farming techniques and involved chemicals, or even make a bad economics argument about buying locally-sourced goods.
You seem to have, at least, expressed a line of reasoning that has no connection to anything that was said.
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Whole Foods has a great selection of gluten-free and lactose-free food (and other stuff) that's hard to find elsewhere. That's great for those intolerant to one or both.
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I see entire aisles of that stuff at Safeway and Wegman's.
Safeway and Wegman's also don't have CEOs who made front-page Slashdot last year after telling the press that their customers were basically liberal hippies who will pay out the nose for shit they don't need. I still don't get how a business stays in business after announcing to the world with seething contempt that its strategy is to mainly target stupid people with jacked-up prices.
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Local represents cheap and in season with a shorter supply chain. The shorter supply chain is very important for things that don't have a shelf life.
Resources don't have to be wasted for storage and shipping.
I can even inspect the production facility myself.
Re:He's right! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with all of those examples is that they were "me too". Perhaps with the exception of Drugstore.com. Even then, that wasn't really taking advantage of what Amazon really is.
If you read the article, Amazon is about scale. Whole Foods gives Amazon scale that is doesn't have in the grocery business and allows it to build out a delivery infrastructure (surely its end game) to support that scale and beyond.
Amazon presents itself as the world's shopping site, but Amazon is really a logistics company. And logistics companies need scale.
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The standout feature on the iPhone IMHO was the App Store. We computer geeks either don't mind or love fiddling with software to get it installed [distrowatch.com]. Regular people (i.e. 98% of the market) hates it. On my Palm Pilot, I had to download a program file to my PC,
Re:He's right! (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of these people take risks. The nature of risks is they can fail. the iPhone could had failed. Enough people may not have liked the onscreen keyboard. Initially not using G3 for data may had been too slow for their usage. The original iPhone, didn't have 3rd party apps, or the response lag on the touch interface was a bit too laggy for them. A number of design tradeoffs could had just as easily caused the iPhone to fail like the Newton.
The thing is we can't predict the future, or judge the reaction of something new before hand.
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Bullcrap.
Amazon didn't acquire LivingSocial or Drugstore.com.
LivingSocial was acquired by GroupOn.
Drugstore.com was acquired by Walgreens.
Anyone who tells you they can see the future (Score:3, Insightful)
...can't even see the tip of their own nose.
The only meaningful prediction you can make about the future is that it will be strange and unexpected.
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And to quote Steve Jobs, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."
You just need to do your best and hope that it turns out well in the future.
Grammar (Score:2)
" opponents' '"
Not a fair comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not really fair to compare anything to a Steve Jobs product. He had the ability to create products with fewer compromises. He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
In that sense, Bezos did a similar thing when he sent his team back to the drawing board to make one-click purchasing actually work, and Amazon does really well in reducing barriers to purchasing because that's what gets customers to buy. The question is, can Amazon be the place where a sizeable chunk of people buy groceries? Sure, if it's more convenient for a large enough number of people, like scan a UPC off the back of a cereal box, and it shows up at the end of the day today at my house, ready for breakfast tomorrow. People say that's impossible. A Steve Jobs *knows* if it's possible, and if it is then won't stop pushing until his company makes it happen.
Re:Not a fair comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a fair comparison and it's not even a real comparison. Especially this quote from the article:
Appleâ(TM)s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app
Apple's goal was not to build a phone or a more personal computer. Apple's goal was literally to protect their ipod business from being inevitably cannibalized by Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and whoever else came along.
That's not a theory, that's literally what the team leaders from the iphone project say. 'we were like oh shit, nobody will buy an ipod if their phone is just as good'.
People also forget that the iphone launched without any third party apps. In fact Steve Jobs didn't want there to be apps on the iphone. So Palm was already ahead of them with third party app support.
Palm was ultimately doomed but that's because they weren't innovating fast enough. Not because they fundamentally saw the business wrong. They had a touchscreen dialer just like the iphone. Their touchscreen dialer was just worse. They had a mobile browser just like the iphone, their mobile browser was just worse. Etc...
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Apple's goal was literally to protect their ipod business from being inevitably cannibalized by Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and whoever else came along. That's not a theory, that's literally what the team leaders from the iphone project say. 'we were like oh shit, nobody will buy an ipod if their phone is just as good'.
Someone may have said that, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story. Jobs killed the Newton shortly after returning to Apple, saying that PDAs didn't make sense to him. He thought that functionality should be in a phone, and not a separate device. Apparently Apple had been working on a lot of the functionality for the iPhone in different projects. They created the iPod. They were working on the iPad. I remember reading an article at shortly after the iPhone's announcement, that people within Apple k
Re:Not a fair comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
I also think it's not fair to single out Palm in the example of the iPhone. I was working in the mobile industry at the time, and the iPhone caught everyone off guard. One day, the Motorola Q and Razr phones were hot shit. Blackberry owned the business smartphone market, but Palm was still in the game. The next day, everyone wanted an iPhone.
One of the big miscalculations was that people hadn't realized how long Apple had been working on the iPhone. They were thinking, "Apple thinks they can just start working on a phone now, and have a working product in the next year?!" Few people had been paying enough attention to realize that the iPhone had been in development for about 10 years.
There was another big miscalculation, but I don't know exactly how to characterize it. Basically, the incumbent vendors thought they were doing a great job. They'd make a new version of the same old device, but it was slightly thinner. They put out the same phone with a slightly higher resolution screen, or a screen that could display more colors. Palm made the glyphs that you had to learn to write with their stylus just a little easier to write. They were tinkering around the edges because it was easy and cheap, and didn't require anyone to be particularly innovative. They thought they were the smartest people around, and because these products were the best they could do, they were the best anyone could do. It's just a thing that happens in entrenched markets, when people get comfortable.
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He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
This is incredibly insightful. It's not that people didn't see the future, it's that very few people understand what the future is. It wasn't Blackberry who predicted the failure of the iPhone, it was the entire world. WTF was a computer company that has a single success of an MP3 player doing getting into the phone market! And where where the buttons. That won't ever take off, LOL!
It's worth remembering all the failures that come with successes and it is definitely correct to not jump and freak out at ever
They just weren't agile enough to survive. (Score:5, Informative)
I consulted briefly for Palm, doing an Open Source training that literally nobody who was invited was interested in hearing. I think they mostly invited the wrong folks. People were really angry that I did things like use examples, rather than just stating the point so that they could get out of there. I usually get good feedback on trainings.
One of their largest problems was that they were unwilling to abandon the 250,000 applications that they stated were built for their original Motorola 68000 architecture. So, when they came out with an ARM-based Palm, that ARM ran a 68000 emulator, and their entire operating system ran in the emulator along with all apps. So, it was obvious this company wasn't agile enough to keep up with new technology.
Of course, I suggested that they base on Linux and build their APIs on top of it. But then, I suggested this to Symbian, too, and they listened just as well - which was not at all. All of those folks thought they had some sort of magic in their kernel and invested unspeakable amounts of money in it. In Palm's case, they had a shared memory architecture that they felt would be difficult to implement on Linux.
Eventually, one of their business successors took on Linux, but way to late to salvage the business.
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Re:They just weren't agile enough to survive. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the point. It's not about the kernel. User's don't see kernels at all, don't care about them. Blackberry certainly learned that lesson. All they spent on QNX and the customers yawned.
The point of having them build on Linux was that rather than investing in kernel development, they could move all of that money to things that mattered to the user experience.
I think around the time I got to HP they had just done a Billion dollar investment in new development of HP/UX. IBM in contrast de-emphasized AIX in favor of Linux, understanding the economics better than HP did. Not that this was HP's only problem.
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Blackberry certainly learned that lesson. All they spent on QNX and the customers yawned.
It was a great system, too bad it failed in the marketplace. It was better than iPhone when iPhone was released, and the certificate system was better than Apple's when Blackberry-QNX was released.
Anyway, as you said, better kernel technology (or even better systems for developers) doesn't win the game.
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They killed themselves. First they ignored the consumer market, then they had things too expensive. when they finally pulled their heads out of their butts it was too late. Along with them giving governments keys to dig into the security and read texts and email, that was the nail in the coffin for them.
Alexa's mistake is being spun for the media. (Score:5, Funny)
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The transcript shows he said, "Alexa buy Whole Foods All natural organic no gmo no preservatives fancy nancy cage free free range chicken stock "
It just dropped a few words in the middle.
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Way to ruin a joke (Score:3)
I liked that joke much better in the briefer Orginal Twitterese [twitter.com].
Re:Alexa's mistake is being spun for the media. (Score:4, Funny)
It was, "Alexa, buy olives from Whole Foods."
Alexa, "Buying all of the Whole Foods."
Let's wait and see first, shall we? (Score:2)
So Amazon went and bought yet another company. AFAIK they're still not profitable and AFAICT organic foodies like buying local and from people they know and can meet in person. Also the newest bottleneck Amazon an Co aparently are facing ist existing delivery infrastructure.
So unless this delivery robot/drone thingie takes off, food delivery might just hit a wall soon.
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So unless this delivery robot/drone thingie takes off, food delivery might just hit a wall soon.
If only there was some way to get a whole bunch of delivery hubs located where people are wealthy enough to pay extra for delivery. Like, say, purchasing a supermarket chain that caters to wealthy shoppers.
Mackey might have the last laugh (Score:2)
Amazon, Uber etc are very innovative in creative lawyering. Like Uber's drivers are not its employess and how Uber is not a taxi company. Amazon will call Whole Foods not a grocery stor
It wasn't just Palm who missed the boat (Score:2)
Nothing new here (Score:3)
For those of us old enough to remember, Ken Olsen laughed at IBM, and the PC makers laughed at him (and don't forget Wang).
Margin, baby (Score:2)
A number of organizations want to deliver groceries. But delivery isn't free. Especially for produce and frozen products! My understanding is that groceries is typically a real low-margin proposition anyway, and that's leaving the last mile to the customer. Except for Whole Foods. It's high price, which I expect means high margin -- a good place to hide delivery costs. AND everyone who shops there has demonstrated the willingness to pay high prices for groceries if you can find the reason that trips t
Analysis or Marketing (Score:2)
This article may be useful for what it tells *us* about how to interpret statements by CEO's, but it makes the mistake of treating a CEO's statement as some objective analytical statement that's meant to stand the test of time like something out of a university. CEO's are never trying to speak "truth". They are always pushing their company's agenda. So when TFA says, "The similarities go deeper, though: both Colligan and Mackey made the same analytical mistakes", the article's author is misunderstanding
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Definition of 'worse' (Score:2)
We must have different definitions of worse, at least for the CEO. Getting bought out by a megacorp sounds like a way better ending than getting left in the dust and ultimately forgotten.
New ideas are NEW (Score:2)
If a new idea is obvious, someone else will have tried and failed.
Real innovation almost always is surprisingly simplistic after it is done, but totally unthinkable before it is done.
Which is why the old guard thought the new guard would fail, they had no concept of the new guard's new idea.
Nothing new... (Score:2)
Bad analogy? (Score:2)
Whole Foods dismisses Amazon. Amazon buys Whole Foods.
Sounds like Whole Foods turned out to be a necessary solution, unlike Palm. I don't think there is a good analogy between Palm and Whole Foods.
Talking to the investors (Score:2)
Don't take public statements by CEOs too literally. Anything they say in public is directed at investors. What kind of CEO is going to say in public, "I don't think we can compete, Apple/Amazon/whoever is going to come in and crush us?" Even if they're really worried, they have to sound confident to keep up the stock price. And then (if they're good), they make plans for how they'll either try to compete or, if that doesn't work, sell out to the giant company instead.
It's not over yet. (Score:2)
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GMO and Organic are not a dichotomy.
Solving the problem of adequate nutrition for an ever-rising population will still result in Malthusian catastrophe. At some point, no amount of science will be able to feed the number of mouths with the available resources, and of course nature will step in to make the demise sudden with some natural disaster or global-warming-induced disaster.
Evangelize ZPG, it's really our only hope.
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N, P, and K are more like "plant vitamins" than "plant food". The bulk of a plant's mass is made of carbon, which it gets from atmospheric CO2. Still, just plain CO2 is not nearly enough for most plants to survive, just like humans couldn't survive on a diet of simple syrup even though the sugars in the syrup are what the bulk of our body mass is eventually made from (what most of our food gets reduced to on the way to becoming the energy and materials needed to operate and reproduce our cells); all the oth
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How can anyone support organic food?
Vaccines cause autism etc. etc. Do you really need to ask?
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Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
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Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
"Organic" produce use both fertilizers and pesticides, they just have to be derived from natural sources
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Organic food is evil.
So does that make the environmental disaster that is fertilizer run off a figment of my imagination?
"Organic" produce use both fertilizers and pesticides, they just have to be derived from natural sources
And your point is?
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The environmental damage due to farming is proportional to the amount of food grown. Modern farming just concentrates that. Better than cutting down all the forests to get enough farmland IMO.
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>Organic wastes more water and energy per kilo of crop yield.
How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
By the same measure, rain wastes far more water than agriculture ever did.
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Plants make water cease to exist all the time, when they strip the hydrogens from it to stick on the sugars they're making. Animals do it to make sugars into fats. And when I get fresh fruits shipped from (dry) California to the (wet) eastern US, that water isn't staying in the California ecosystem. That said, it is a little ridiculous when I have to have low-flow showerheads and toilets designed for
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Sorry but asking stupid farmers that decide to farm a freaking desert is not who I will ask.
I'll ask the ones that had brains and picked a fertile and resource strong area to farm instead.
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How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
A lot of the water used to grow crops in the deserts of California and the like comes from wells, rather than surface water. Depending on the aquifer, and how deep it is, it can take millennia to replenish those stocks, if they ever will replenish. Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well. Yes, a lot of the water used in irrigation comes from surface water sources, but aquifer depletion is a real problem as well.
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>Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well.
And it's the farms that are using the water right? So they are the one's responsible for their own demise.
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Do yourself a favor and look up "aquifer". Much of the water used in agriculture comes from underground aquifers that have been storing water for tens of thousands of years. Annual rainfall replaces but a tiny percentage of that.
So they shouldn't be extracting more than a tiny percentage of the aquifer contents if they want the aquifer contents to remain at existing levels. However rather than being 'wasted', using that water more fits the definition of being put to use.
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Monsanto and others like them have "poisoned the well" of GMO/science based foods. Monsanto based GMO corn has contaminated nearly all corn DNA with an inherent pesticide that 10% of people have violent allergies to, and maybe 40% have GI upset with... The practice of hozing down wheat with Roundup (a Monsanto product) that started in 2000 is likely the root cause of the massive spike in Celiac and Celiac like symptoms (maybe also IBS). The problem is that the FDA needs to start treating GMO like it trea
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The flip side is that we (as humans) have been genetically modifying our crops since the advent of agriculture.
As far as your argument regarding Roundup and Wheat, I'm pretty sure you're incorrect with that. Monsanto lists Corn, Soybean, Sorghum, Canola, Alfalfa, Cotton, and Sugar Beets as being currently available with the "Roundup Ready" modification. Wheat is still in development.
I actually don't know how good of a candidate that wheat, and the other grains, really are for the mod anyways. Modern cultiva
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If Amazon can use its logistics network to cut Whole Foods prices to something close to QFC, they can keep the checkers. Of course, if Amazon's idea of "automated checkout" ever really works, I doubt people will have a problem with it.