PART 1: THE INTERNET IS HAVING A KODAK MOMENT

Anyone with a domain name & and an email list had the same chance as anyone else of becoming the go-to start page for their niche.

Kodak, after having literally invented the digital camera, failed to recognize that digital was quickly becoming the inevitable future of photography.

Most people just weren’t ready to live online. Perhaps most importantly, using the internet was still a novel, infrequent activity. Unlike today, where most of us now spend several hours online daily – back then, it was something you’d “turn on” a few times a week at most.

For the most part, Web 1.0 was a fairly lonely experience – both for homesteaders & visitors. There was a lot to see, but there wasn’t that much to do.

Amazon owns the shopper. From its start here status for buying anything online to its world-class fulfillment & logistics infrastructure, the Amazon ecommerce experience is unmatched – nothing else even comes close.

The fact that you can count on one hand the number of CEO’s who effectively control 95% of the internet experience as we know it is pretty astounding.

The internet was small, slow, and limited. Even at the height of the dot-com frenzy, it’s important to realize that only 7% of the world had internet access. And those who did had to endure dialup connections with dreadful connection speeds.

Key infrastructure didn’t exist yet. We take it for granted today, but there was no such thing as 3PL fulfillment, same-day shipping, supply-chain automation, etc. back in the dot-com boom.

Google & Facebook have similarly perfected this balance between harvesting data, content & attention from us in exchange for a little convenience, distribution & dopamine to keep us plugged in.