Comment by float4
3 days ago
As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.
AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.
Yes, this has always been the major advantage of online shopping for me, since its very appearance.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.
for a few years I was an HP Server Automation SME.
I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).
every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.
the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.
Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.
Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.
I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.
Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.
We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.
Not so much angry at the actual dotcom era but more of the fallout of offshoring that followed.
One of the notable figures in that, Carly Fiorina, made a point to “forget the engineers”.
Consider this difference between today and the dotcom boom:
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147793)
That will make a hell of a difference between being all for it and booing the proponents of the new order.
There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
Free Prime shipping which started in 2005 was the real killer. Before that it was more about the large variety that was simply not available in bookstores etc. so people were willing to pay extra for shipping.
What's amazing to me is that even with prime free shipping in the US. NOTHING has ever beaten USPS for small shipping.
And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.
Example.
The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.
Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.
Department of Defense should have been renamed Department of Logistics.
No. Not at all. This type of reaction to a new technology is probably different from all the previous ones. There wasn’t talk of a “permanent underclass” for other revolutions. But with AI, we will probably see a lot of labor just become unnecessary in many parts of society, not just one industry.
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.
No, it was novel and exciting.
Apples and oranges.
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
> What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
[0] In its new soulless incarnation.