In 1995, an astronomer named Clifford Stoll told Newsweek readers that the idea of shopping moving from malls to modems was "baloney."
His case sounded airtight at the time… because his local mall did more business in one afternoon than the entire internet did in a month.
There was no safe way to pay online... and the web was missing the one thing he believed every sale needed… a salesperson.
Last year, Americans spent $1.23 trillion shopping online.
Stoll, copped to his mistakes… later calling the piece his "1995 howler."
I thought about him last week while reading comments about Meta Connect, the company's big annual product event.
Some of what Meta showed off, I love.
The new VR glasses ditch the clunky battery pack, weigh about as much as a deck of cards according to Meta, and cost $1,299. This is what the Apple Vision Pro should have been.
Some of it I'm less sure about…
The Muse Charm is a keychain-sized gadget you talk to instead of pulling out your phone.
Could it flop? Absolutely.
Then again, Americans once paid good money for a Pet Rock (and more recently Labubu toys) so I'm not ruling anything out.
The real story is Muse itself though…
Muse is an AI agent that goes off and does the errand for you... it browses the store, fills the basket, and shows you the total to approve before a cent is charged.
At the event, Meta added Walmart, GameStop, Gap and Wayfair to the list of stores it can shop.
The bears already have their rebuttal…
Fortune argued that shopping is personal partly because people enjoy doing it.
Wowzas.
That's Stoll's salesperson argument all over again
Sure, some shopping is fun… like a new watch or a vacation outfit.
But most of what a household buys is restocking.
In our house, that means the dog food Jasper eats through faster than I remember to reorder it. And you best believe I hate making that trip…
Convenience beat the mall, and I expect it to beat the search bar too.
Adoption won't be a straight line… Amazon has already blocked Muse for instance…
But e-commerce didn't need everybody in 1995 either.
It needed the people who valued their time more than the browsing… and in the long run, that turned out to be most of us.
Oliver
P.S. Muse has already climbed to the No. 1 spot for free downloads on both Apple's and Google's app stores.