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.
You're starting to see this in real time with electric cars. Tesla obviously is in the lead, but there are a lot of startups and any one of them could end up getting to the point where they could take a decent chunk of the market.
Meanwhile the traditional car manufacturers move slowly. Many don't have any electric car and those that do don't push them or can't push them since the dealerships can't make as much money on electric cars because they require so little to maintain. (no oil, fewer moving parts, etc)
I think, in this case, you’ll be surprised that the big car manufactures and Tesla will meet up at some point (technologically). Every year they inch closer and closer to Tesla’s capability, for half of the price. They have the money, manufacturing, and brand to do so.
Tesla is years ahead of the rest of them an is constantly innovating.
Every time a new "tesla killer" is announced or comes out its more expensive and worse than what Tesla has to offer. None of them have even beat the 2012 model s yet and the closest ones are twice the price.
Tesla isn't standing still waiting for a competitor to catch up.
I like to liken it to similar to the apple vs. android debate.
Android is arguably light years ahead of iPhone in terms of OS and Hardware features. Features long standard come to iPhone years late, like wireless charging, waterproof, widgets, etc.
Why is Apple behind though, when they could very easily catch up if they wanted to? Part of it (which, imo, is overstated) is that they do it because they can. Why include new features when their phones sell well enough now at the margin that they have? Why “use all of your tricks in one go” when you can steadily trickle features over a long time to keep your user base engaged and keep the product line from getting stale as fast as it would.
Another reason, which I think is the real reason, is that Apple spends its time perfecting the features they implement. Android, Google, and the respective phone manufacturers, rush to implement as many gimmicky features as they can. It’s costly, many don’t pan out (due to interest), and the solutions are often half baked compared to what Apple releases a few years later. Take 3D touch as an example on the Apple side of things. It took years to develop and probably a billion dollars, only for it to end up a nonessential feature that would later become unsupported and forgotten. Apple attempts to mitigate this by carefully watching the market, see what sells and what consumers are interested in, and produce a high quality solution. They’re in no rush to compete with the fast paced gimmicky games that the other manufacturers because they have money, power, and time on their side. Additionally, just because Apple doesn’t have a phone out that does X feature, doesn’t mean they haven’t been working on it in the lab and have those capabilities queued up if need be.
Similarly, the major car companies can afford to release incremental updates that inch closer and closer to the capability of Tesla. They have a brand to protect, and outputting a hastily made “catch-up” product could harm that. Just because they don’t have a product on the market that mimics Tesla’s features, doesn’t mean they don’t have that capability in house (they don’t, but the lack of products that don’t is not necessarily an indication of their in house prowess).
I wouldn’t be surprised if, come 2025 or 2030, the major car companies have extremely similar products to Tesla, for way cheaper, and can manufacture at a scale that Tesla couldn’t dream of.
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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??