As the Christmas shopping season winds down, here are some thoughts from the ghost of Christmas past. Specifically, this is from Newsweek circa 1995:
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Hopefully they’ll figure out a way to move money around the internet someday…
Epic find. After laughing at a piece like this, I start to wish I could read it to it’s original author for some follow up thoughts. If only…