The Internet mall idea boomed then died and then Amazon and Alibaba grew up

At the beginning of the Internet, people envisioned a shopping mall.  They had no e-commerce experience or history. The technology was too low bandwidth to deliver today's experience. Pictures and catalog content had to be delivered "overnight" to potential customers if you wanted an actual catalog experience. The analogy broke down due to technology and the unfettered access customers had to any website.

MCI wanted to build an Internet Mall at the dawn of the Internet era.  They and everyone else knew that shopping would be big on the Internet and they envisioned that they could manage the mall front and that companies would lease space on the mall website. The technology was limited so the thing would only work if people would leave their computers on at night to download product catalogs. The project product people used analogies and patterns they were comfortable with when putting together proposals.

The development team was pretty vocal that the internet wasn't going to work that way. Then people realized that a company only "needed" to have an internet domain name to stand up their storefront that would get the same exposure as all the national and international brands.  Domain names suddenly became investments.  A person I knew sold pizza.com for 1 million dollars.  MCI's project died.  

Amazon was just an online book company.


Everyone wasn't equal on the internet. Availability didn't equal marketing reach. Managing an online business can be hard.   Big companies failed on their own internet sites and ended up selling through other companies. Some did this multiple times and blew millions of dollars.  Eventually e-commerce competence became necessary or you had to rely on someone else to stay relevant. The development team had been right and not right.

Today Amazon accounts for 45% of all US e-commerce with over 200,00 sellers that essentially rent space in what is essentially the Amazon mall. Sellers still need to market their products. Customers still know product brands.  They learn which resellers are reliable. Alibaba accounts for 58% of China's e-commerce sales with a similar, but larger, story to Amazon's.

Video

<to be recorded>

Revision History

Created 2023 06





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaults to a maximum RAM size of 5
Read more

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Update Driver  does  not  install the RNDI
Read more

DNS for Azure Point to Site (P2S) VPN - getting the internal IPs

Image
I wanted to access all my Azure resources without making any of them visible to the Internet.   The easiest give my local machine access to everything on my Azure Virtual Network (VNET) was to connect to it over VPN. It turns out creating Azure VPN gateways and connecting to Azure VPN endpoints is easy.  There are some subtleties in getting DNS name resolution to work that can confuse when first starting out. Setting the Stage There are a few ways to get to Azure endpoints and resources that are blocked from the internet.  We can  Create a Point-to-Site connection from our local machines to Azure Network Gateways Create a Site-to-Site network connection from our local networks to Azure Network Gateways. Use Bastion Hosts Use Cloud Shell Leave everything open to the internet. I chose a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN connection that connects from my laptop to a VNet Gateway.  That joins my laptop
Read more