Sears's History Predicts Almost Everything Amazon's Doing
I read an interesting forum post about Sears a few years back [1]TLDR: In 1985 Sears had vast mail order experience, co-founded an ISP (Prodigy), and had their own credit cards (Discover). All the components they'd need to dominate online retail. In 1993 they closed their mail order division. In 1995, Amazon launched.[1] http://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline...