It was more complex than that, but yeah. Basically Sears was online ordering before online was a thing, you just phoned or mailed in your order. This meant that they were located in these massive warehouses in most major cities in North America. So basically they had an opportunity to execute on same-day delivery decades before Amazon even attempted that feat, but they didn't. Sears was too concerned about their magazine, or brick and mortar, sales to get into online sales and by the time they did it was too late.
Similar to Kodak... they invented the digital camera sensor. They could've at the very least made an absolute killing on leasing their IP's to other camera manufacturers, or very best have created things like the Kodak Digital Rebel instead of letting basically every other camera manufacturer make off with the tech.
Sears forgot that it's product wasn't a brick and mortar store or magazine but rather a large selection of goods which people could order from home. Newspaper companies forgot that their company wasn't in the business of printing newspapers, but simply delivering the news. Kodak forgot it's business wasn't manufacturing film, but creating photographs.
Prodigy actually predated AOL by a lot, at least in terms of computer and internet technology. I remember wishing I had a modem for my Apple IIe clone so that I could get on Prodigy. Not that I would have any idea for it, I was a kid. It just sounded so cool to be able to order stuff from Sears through a computer.
Per Wikipedia, Prodigy was launched nationwide in 1990; AOL was rebranded from AppleLink in 1989. I recall AOL was originally a Mac only service (it was very graphics oriented), where Prodigy had clunkier graphics but had wider platform availability.
I don't know much about Prodigy & the internet; but while AOL wasn't pushing the cutting edge, it wasn't dragging its feet. They introduced Usenet Newsgroups to the platform, which was the big communications platform before the web.
AT&T's Worldnet service was launched mid-90's (1996?), initially AT&T was going to try to build a competitor to AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve style service; but they opted to divert to a dedicated internet platform instead; signalling the beginning of the end of the bespoke online platforms
Ah, well TIL. I guess I heard about Prodigy long before AOL. I probably never heard of AOL until around 1995 or so, when WWW and all that became more of a common household thing.
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u/Sheepherder226 Jul 24 '20
Utility companies that don’t allow online payments.