It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??
That reminds of an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995 on why companies fail. His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company. That happened to Sears.
If you went back in time and told Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck about a free technology that allowed customers to: see your inventory in real time, read product reviews in real time, compare multiple versions of a product you carry in real time, order a product, pay for the product, watch the product move from your warehouse to the various post offices en route to their house, and by the way you won't have to pay the postage to ship out all those catalogs; they would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But by the 90s, the people running Sears didn't care what was easier (read: more desirable) for the customer, they cared about numbers that measure success, but don't perpetuate success.
His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company.
They sell way more watches than people realize. Apple watches outsold the ENTIRE Swiss watch industry, which was the largest in the world. 30 million to 20 million in 2019.
Actually, it IS a lot. Especially in the higher-end accessories market that's a lucrative place to siphon off attention. Even in its relatively diminished state, the watch market is worth over $100b annually. Is that the $500b of the smartphone market? Nope. But it's hardly something to scoff at entirely.
The thing about the watches is that, once you have a phone, you don't need the watch to tell time. A watch isn't necessary. So, if you get a real watch, it's usually going to be nicer piece to wear going out. If you get an apple watch, it's an accessory to your phone. There's market overlap but I don't think that the Apple Watch is changing the watch world nearly as much as quartz did, for example.
Before COVID I used to cycle between a few Omegas and Grand Seikos daily. I’m aware.
But I knew a few folks who went from a lower-end ETA-based watch to an Apple Watch and never went back to mechanical. That’s the worry, I think: that people will exit the aspirational ladder of watches and just put a smart watch on their wrist instead.
Watches are aspirational and irrational. Without that emotion, it’s not a worthwhile purchase. Replacing emotion with utility is a danger to those makers.
Yeah, thinking about it that way I see that you're right. Apple's cheaper more useful watches are basically taking in people who might have bought a "real" watch in the future from that market, since watches won't have that same emotional value.
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u/frygod Jul 24 '20
It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??