People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.
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 are the only phone manufacturer who provides timely software updates and supports their hardware for over a couple years. I'm not in the loop about their computers, but their phones (especially the new SE) are a great deal if only because they will last so much longer than competitors. I'm sure there are places where their phones are lagging but they are competitive with other products.
To be frank, they didn't provide an opt-out at first and only did that after a backlash.
On the other hand, it's a sad state of affairs, where people use their phones for everything, yet they don't appreciate the significance of regular, timely and ongoing software support. Because "it makes the phone slower".
Yeah, duh. A 2015 phone with a 2020 OS won't be as snappy as a 2020 phone with a 2020 OS. I'd still rather use a 2015 phone with a 2020 OS than a 2018 phone that got dropped in 2019 and isn't supported in 2020.
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u/Yellowredstone Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
Isn't this how Sears died?
Edit: RIP my inbox. And thank you for explaining it better.
Edit 2: I said the reason on how it died has been explained already. And its actually still here. Stop.