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Ask Jeeves Shut Down (www.ask.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [B] to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] 9 points 6 months ago (5 children)

I mean, Sears built a massive business empire via mail order and shipping products, and now effectively no longer exists. Amazon directly replaced them with the same business model just digitized, despite starting as just a bookstore.

Not utilizing evolving tech that seems like an obvious match for a company is surprisingly common.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Same thing with Blockbuster and Netflix. Netflix even turned down the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50m, and today Netflix is worth ~$400,000,000,000.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    I was working at Blockbuster when that went down. We then rolled our our own mail order dvd service and honestly...it was better and it still failed. you could order movies and games online, get them delivered, then just drop them off at your local blockbuster and instantly switch them out for free for whatever was next in your queue and STILL have movies coming in via mail. I saw customers coming in daily just switching movies and games out. Management figured "oh people will come in when they return their mail ins and get more and pay more for extra stuff" nope. people came in and swapped out exactly for the free movies or ones already in queue and that was it. no extras. I remember doing entire shifts where I did zero financial transactions.

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