A totally bizarre December 2000 Daily Mail story

[The DJ]

Stating that the Internet was "just a fad" and insisting that "millions of people" were turning away from it.

 

[johnnychips]

The writing is a bit blurred, but no doubt somewhere in the article, it will say it causes cancer.

 

[duncanp]

Remember that this article was written before the widespread adoption of high speed broadband and mobile technology, so it is not so fanciful as it seems to us 20 years later.

Far fewer people had the internet at home then, and not every company or organisation had a website.

Similar things were said about television when it first started, and it was events such as the coronation in 1953 that gave TV a boost, with many people buying a set for the first time specifically for that occasion.

 

[nlogax]

Don't remember this article but at the time it was published I was already in my seventh year of being online. Nice to see that the Daily Mail started their habit of lukewarm takes, lazy writing and contrarianism so early on in the millennium.

 

[birchesgreen]

I was already in my 5th year of employment working in web development.

 

[Busaholic]

I have an article from The Independent newspaper dated 2001 headlined 'What happens if Amazon fails?' It seemed a very real possibility at that time. Mind you, anything could be said to be possible from here-on-in too.

 

[gg1]

I have an article from The Independent newspaper dated 2001 headlined 'What happens if Amazon fails?' It seemed a very real possibility at that time. Mind you, anything could be said to be possible from here-on-in too.

Out of interest is that article available online anywhere?

I don't recall Amazon being huge at that point, possibly the biggest online retailer but a long way off the market dominance they have now, and the bulk of retail was still store based at the time. Based on that my initial response to the question in the headline would be 'Not a lot'.

 

[Bertie the bus]

There was nothing bizarre about that story at all. 2000 was when the internet bubble burst and it did look like a fad at the time. Had the later advances in technology, which most couldn’t have predicted at the time, not occurred then it quite possibly would have just been a fad.

Many parts of the internet are still quite baffling to me today. I started my career in IT at a mail order company. Mail order was often seen as the lower end of retail and many had a snobby attitude to it. Except for the hype there really isn’t that much difference between mail order and internet shopping.

 

[GusB]

At that point in time access to the internet was pretty much limited to people who had access to a computer. I had access at work with a fairly decent connection speed, but not that many people I knew had PCs at home. I first started using the internet at university a few years earlier so I was reasonably familiar with the web when it did start gaining traction.

Mobile internet was still in its infancy via WAP - if I recall correctly, GPRS started becoming more widely available the following year - and phones were still quite primitive. It was probably the advent of the smartphone that kicked it off properly; people had a device with a decent screen size in their pockets.

 

[gg1]

At that point in time access to the internet was pretty much limited to people who had access to a computer. I had access at work with a fairly decent connection speed, but not that many people I knew had PCs at home. I first started using the internet at university a few years earlier so I was reasonably familiar with the web when it did start gaining traction.

Mobile internet was still in its infancy via WAP - if I recall correctly, GPRS started becoming more widely available the following year - and phones were still quite primitive. It was probably the advent of the smartphone that kicked it off properly; people had a device with a decent screen size in their pockets.

I'd say the introduction of affordable broadband, which predated smartphones by 5 years or so, was a far bigger driver. The iPhone was launched in 2007 but smartphones didn't really become the norm until a few years after that, initially they were very much the preserve of techies. The internet was thoroughly in the mainstream by that point, thinking back to the late 00s I don't recall knowing anyone under 50 who didn't have home internet access.

 

[Busaholic]

Out of interest is that article available online anywhere?

I don't recall Amazon being huge at that point, possibly the biggest online retailer but a long way off the market dominance they have now, and the bulk of retail was still store based at the time. Based on that my initial response to the question in the headline would be 'Not a lot'.

I haven't looked, but I very much doubt it.

Amazon at that point had been going for quite a few years, first in the USA and then the U.K. and had made staggering losses overall. I suspect they only managed to survive by robbing Peter to pay Paul i.e. their policy of taking 100% of the value of the order from the outset kept the tills ringing, and those claiming refunds for unavailable, unsupplied or otherwise unattractive purchases were fobbed off for protracted periods, resulting in a low proportion of refunds being made. Used to make this indy bookseller hopping mad!

 

[birchesgreen]

Amazon didn't make a profit for a long time, but they invested heavily in web services and now run a huge chunk of the internet.