4765

Ahahahaha. He’s a shoe-in!

Screenshot_2022-12-27-13-47-17-23_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b12
Screenshot_2022-12-27-13-47-17-23_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b121080×2035 129 KB

The first electronic mail sent over a network and in doing so birthing the xxx@yyy schema was in 1971. Not bad for an eight year old!

4766

And if a killer robot had been sent back in time to kill Jeff Bezos’s mom and he had never been born, then life today would be …

… pretty much exactly the same. Maybe plus or minus a day on when you receive your online order. Bezos did a bunch of stuff, but had he never been born, one or more of the hundreds of other companies trying to do online retail in the 90s would have gained traction instead.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon weren’t the ones mainly responsible for changing the world. The Internet changed the world. Bezos didn’t invent the Internet, or even come up with the idea of selling retail goods to consumers over it. Yes, through hard work, shrewd timing and a whole lotta good fortune he beat out a bunch of other people to grab the lion’s share of the profit from the online retail bonanza, a bonanza everyone who understood the Internet in the first half of the 90s knew was coming when the general public adopted the Web. But that doesn’t mean a guy with a shaved head named Bezos was specifically required to get us the general result of people ordering groceries in our pajamas at home in the middle of the night. There were lots of other people ready to step in.

The changes to logistics would still eventually have happened if Mrs. Bezos was killed by a Terminator in 1963. In addition to not inventing the Internet, Jeff Bezos did not invent logistics.

The pieces were already all there, just waiting to be assembled into a form suitable for online retail. Other things that existed before Amazon made use of them: the idea of “the algorithm” i.e. tailoring results to user behavior (which came from the evolution of search engines before it hit Amazon), the ability to make online credit card charges, shipment tracking and computerized inventory tracking, regional distribution centers tied to the shipping network (invented by FedEx), “just in time” shipping, the global system of containerization, the idea that China was going to be the workshop to the world in the 21st century, operations research/linear programming, etc. etc. etc.

This was true … in the 70s. In the 70s, you either bought things from a local store, or you bought them from a catalog. Buying them from a catalog mean sending in an order form through surface mail, along with a check (or a money order, or cash,) to the business. It took a few days for the order to get there, a couple days for the order to be processed, and then 2-3 weeks for the order to be shipped to your home.

Skip ahead to 1990. Pre-Amazon, but the world of catalog retail had already changed considerably. Instead of sending in an order form, you would more usually call a toll-free number, place your order with a credit card, and then wait 2-3 weeks for the order to be shipped to your home. Unless you paid extra for express shipping.

Then along comes Amazon, and the world changes again. In 1996, you’d go on Amazon, order your book or CD (because that’s what Amazon sold in 1996) online …

… and then wait 2-3 weeks for the order to be shipped to your home. Unless you paid extra for express shipping. Because that’s how the world worked in 1996. We wouldn’t get 7-day standard shipping until later. And that was thanks to a whole bunch of hard work by FexEx, UPS etc. and the rest of the entire logistics network to get shipping times down. (Is there no room in your pantheon for Frederick W. Smith, Timex? He did as much for logistics as Bezos. Though, um, looking at his Wilkipedia page I can see why we wouldn’t want to put him up on a pedestal. Remind me never to get in a car with him.)

The even bigger point, though, is that our culture is utterly hypnotized by the Great Man theory. We just automatically assume it is true without looking into the Great Man’s story, let alone the stories of the people who competed with him. The problems being, 1) the Great Man theory is misleading 9 times out of 10; emperor Musks who are wearing fewer clothes than they claim to are the rule, not the exception, and 2) the Great Man illusion is maintained by vast amounts of PR from the Great Men and their companies, who have a huge vested interest in having the public believe erroneous things like, “We wouldn’t have online retail today if not for Jeff Bezos and Amazon.”

4767

You clearly have not read Atlas Shrugged…

4768

Nah man, in 1990, buying stuff was nothing like it is now. No one bought stuff from catalogs. That’s the thing, pre-amazon, buying stuff from catalogs was an entirely different beast than your normal process of buying stuff.

Not even including the inconvenience of shipping, there was simply the fact that you were essentially buying stuff from…one store. Oh, you want to buy a thing? Do you want THIS particular thing? Because that’s what’s in the catalog. You don’t want that one? Guess that’s too bad.

That’s what is fundamentally different now, than it was pre-Amazon. Now, we can go and buy damn near anything, from anywhere in the world, and have it on our doorstep in a matter of days, if not hours. Amazon made it such that buying stuff online, in a market that spanned the entire globe, was able to entirely replace the prior retail paradigm that we had lived with our entire lives up until that point.

It’s not that we’re buying stuff on a website. It’s that we’re buying literally anything we want, from anywhere in the entire world. That’s not how it used to be. That is a massive shift, that impacts everything in our lives at this point.

You can try to minimize Bezos’ role in that all you want, but again that’s a side point to the fact that Elon Musk has done really nothing that revolutionizes any aspect of our lives. Our lives are pretty much EXACTLY as they would have been, if Elon Musk had never existed at all. Even if you grant him sole credit for the stuff he’s linked to… Elon Musk’s impact on the overall world still ain’t that big.

4769

Wasn’t eBay doing all that at least several years before Amazon really kicked into gear? I recall eBay being the initial disruptor in the online space, at least outside the US as they expanded from just an auction site to allowing 3rd party storefronts and particularly after the PayPal acquisition and resultant consumer protections that brought in.

4770

I don’t think so. EBay never functioned as a real retail marketplace like Amazon.

What EBay did, was make an open framework for folks to engage in one on one transactions. This was a big thing, and part of why Ebay’s worth billions now, but it never had the same kind of impact in terms of how normal folks engaged in their normal, every-day commerce.

Like, for instance, I think I’ve bought stuff from Ebay…once? Twice maybe?

But Amazon’s pretty much the way I buy virtually everything I buy, other than groceries, and maybe some stuff from a local hardware store when specific brand doesn’t matter.

Being able to offer me a selection of goods which includes…like… every option there is, and have it delivered to me fast enough that it’s not really any lack of convenience compared to driving to a store to get it, is what makes it difference in kind to what came before.

EBay also offered something like a difference in kind compared to what came before, but what it was replacing was a much smaller niche of transactions.

4771

I dunno, over here, “I’ll just grab it from Ebay” was in the popular vernacular waaaay before the same was true of Amazon.

4772

Same over here. eBay was the mainstream online shopping stop before Amazon took over (now competitors are eroding Amazon, which has less than 50% market share as of last year).

4773

Sure, no argument there. I just think comparing apples to apples, Bezos’ impact on history is greater than Musk’s, though admittedly it’s a silly discussion overall. All those things you hand wave away have to be done by someone. And it’s easy to say “it would have happened anyhow,” and maybe so, but we don’t know that. We do know that Amazon (and of course, yes, the Internet, which goes without saying is the real driver of all of this) did happen though, and I’m not quite convinced that either was inevitable.

It isn’t just mail-order. It’s the scope, scale, and speed of logistics. When I ordered stuff off the back of a comic in 1968 (which I did, Sea Monkeys, which turned out to be, um, brine shrimp) it took weeks–“allow six to eight weeks for delivery”–and you had to send a check. You also had to find a physical catalog somewhere, and outside of a few general purpose stores like Sears, most mail-order was highly specialized into little niches (the catalogues were cool to read though). Also, you had access to nearly zero stuff from beyond the USA. Some from Europe, or Japan, but not much else.

Today it’s next-day delivery, goods from everywhere, multiple payment methods, and instant access to catalogs of nearly infinite stuff. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is very very different in kind and degree from fifty years ago IMO.

4774

But not very different from what lots of other people were trying to do when Bezos was building Amazon. I bought coffee on the internet before you could buy it on Amazon. I bought travel on the internet before you could buy anything but books on Amazon. There was a scramble to bring retail to the internet, lots of people did. If Bezos and Amazon had not won the lottery, then some other company would have. And the logistics were always going to follow the curve of the online sales growth model.

The same is true of SpaceX and Tesla. If they weren’t making launch vehicles or electric cars, someone else would be making launch vehicles and electric cars. Maybe not the same one, and maybe it would have taken a bit longer, but it would have happened. It’s hard to look at what they do and say that it has changed the world.

4775

And here is where I still think SpaceX is unique. Yes, without Musk and therefore without SpaceX somebody would still be doing space launch. But it would be the same somebody’s who had been doing ridiculously expensive space launch for decades. Reusing rockets was basically considered impossible until SpaceX finally did it(after blowing up how many rockets trying). Yes, that was only due to I don’t know how many engineers working crazy long hours to make the impossible possible. But it’s legit something that wouldn’t have happened without Musk, at least not happened for a long time. And hey, ask far off the deep end as Musk has gone, without SpaceX our only other way to get to the ISS right now would be Russia.

4776

It’s hard to see retrospectively where an inflection point turns. As one data point (and my particular bugbear), look at Taiwanese computer case manufacturers. They’ve basically been making the same design with different bling for 40 years, and even today still spend (apparently) 0 effort in applying actual engineering techniques to airflow. And with no disruption they’ll be happy to do this for the next 50 years. You’ll be able to hand your great grandkids your current computer case, because the market there has no ability nor desire to innovate.

Would the PC have happened without Microsoft or Apple? Would the internet have happened without Netscape (ie, a browser) instead of being siloed like America Online? Would Social Media exist without the iPhone? Would retail have evaporated without Amazon? Would Walmart have happened without Chinese trade deals? Ect. Sometimes that last mile innovation is apparently the hardest innovation to make, since a profitable, successful company at the time has enormous inertia and more incentives not to rock the boat, and sometimes execution has an innovative quality of its own.

However all of these “innovations” rely heavily on access to capital, not even on the execution. A company that has more or less unlimited access to capital can fail upwards for a long long time. You might just as well argue that the real innovation behind the innovators is the market money-tree providing a firehose of capital for these ‘disruptors’ to use at their whim.

4777

By the same token, though, we don’t know what didn’t happen, and these actions did effect changes. It’s sort of a silly argument–these companies, products, services, perhaps people have made changes. We can argue over a lot of the details but in the end, change doesn’t just occur, it has to be willed into existence somehow.

4778

I don’t think there is any reason to believe this. It’s more the case that advances and capabilities made what SpaceX is doing possible than it is the case that only SpaceX could have done it.

4779

I think this is a really important point. The willingness to pour wheelbarrows full of money into sketchy businesses models, to endure years of losses in the hopes of hitting one home run, is very much a new thing. What powers it is obscene wealth. It wasn’t Bezos that made Amazon possible. It was the massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy kicked off by the Reagan revolution.

To me, it’s a bit like saying only emperor so-and-so could have built the Roman roads. It was the system that amassed wealth and power and created a standing army with engineering skills and military needs that built those roads, not Augustus or Tiberius or Marcus Aurelius.

4780

I don’t think it is the case that only SpaceX could have done it, but I do believe it is the case that only SpaceX would have done it for the foreseeable future. Not because of Musk’s brilliance, I’m sure there are plenty of people who knew reusability could work, but because he had the desire to try for it and the access to the capital to make it happen(and the ability to sell investors on that vision, probably his biggest actual contribution). On top of that, he was able to leverage a hungry bunch of engineers who were willing to dedicate years of their life to making it happen. It’s a lot of pieces that had to come together that weren’t going to just happen on their own.

Legacy space had no interest in moving the industry forward, they were happy to just keep on milking lucrative government projects( this is probably why it is so different from the other industries being discussed, it wasn’t clear there was profit in making space cheaper). And no start-ups had access to the capital to invest what was needed to make that happen at the scale. Even Branson and Bezos vanity space companies had their sights set considerably lower.

We’re something like 9 years on from the first successful Falcon 9 recovery and where’s the competition at? You’ve got the big players struggling to pick up new commercial contracts and being propped up by their respective governments. And you’ve got the other startups still with limited resources trying to someday actually be competitors.

4781

Maybe, but I’m skeptical, and there isn’t any way to prove either of us right.

Where is the market? Is it big enough for two SpaceXs? Is SpaceX actually profitable?

4782

And this is why the legacy companies weren’t interested in innovating. They didn’t see the market opportunities. Again, this is actually part of why what SpaceX did wasn’t going to just happen from someone else in the near future.

It’s a private company so I couldn’t tell you, but they’ve certainly created a more accessible market to space, and seem to have enough money to continue to build out their launch capacity while also spending millions of Starship(which could very well be a huge failure that sinks the company).

Here, compare Falcon 9 launches:
image

To what ULA is doing:
image

How about Arianespace:

image
image814×504 6.24 KB

Not only did SpaceX obviously find a market above and beyond what those legacy companies had, SpaceX has also clearly taken launches from them.

Here’s a 2022 breakdown by rocket type. Apparently the only competition for SpaceX is China and Russia.
image

But that’s kind of the issue with disruption in space. Nobody had been innovating. But you couldn’t just have a basement startup come and innovate because it’s so ridiculously expensive.

4783

Yes, I understand that SpaceX has the lion’s share of the market because their pricing model beats the competition. But does the pricing model produce a profit, or a loss sustained by
Elon’s massive wealth and access to more? If the latter, why would any competitor follow him down that same path, rather than what they are doing, which seems to be leveraging what they have while trying to conventionally improve what they have?

4784

I guess I’m not sure why we’re still debating if you believe that what SpaceX is doing wasn’t inevitable and instead required access to sums of money that only Musk was able/willing to bring to the table.