[tialaramex]

People genuinely worried about this. If you go back to around the time SSL is announced, the media coverage says well, you can't really have shopping on the Internet because there's no way to secure credit card purchases. Clifford Stoll has a rant from around then in which he just plain asserts it will never happen, even though that's actually written IIRC after SSL shipped.

A few years later it's much more about whether this is really going to take off, there's no doubt people can do it, but is there any desire? There's a BBC clip on Youtube from the era when Amazon is an exciting new business, it has a lot more different books in stock than any bricks and mortar store, but it doesn't have the enormous sales volumes compared to real world book stores yet, Bezos could just be another entrepreneur with an idea that sounds good - he isn't yet incredibly rich and so he also seems much less weird.