The Idea of Showrooming

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According to Wikipedia, the word “showrooming” was coined in the 2010s. The earliest reference I can find is in a Wall Street Journal article dated April 2012, which opens as follows:

“Shoppers who scope out merchandise in stores but buy on rivals’ websites, usually at a lower price, have become the bête noire of many big-box retailers.”

By September 2012, showrooming is being described as a “commonly held belief”, and being dismissed as a falsehood by the CEO of Best Buy.

But the idea of showrooming was mooted many years previously, in discussions between Jeff Bezos and HP. Nick Earle, then an executive with HP, mentioned this in a keynote speech in June 2000.

During his speech, Earle recalled a conversation he had with Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., an HP client. When Earle asked Bezos to describe a “killer application” from Amazon.com’s perspective, he described a handheld device with a wireless link and a bar-code reader that would enable customers to scan in a book from another retailer, find out how much cheaper it is sold at Amazon.com, and then order it online for next-day delivery. “We will make one,” Earle promised.

I cited this conversation in 2004, as evidence that Bezos got ecosystem thinking. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that he had basically invented the iPhone. And he had had the idea of showrooming, over a decade before the word was coined.

So I asked Nick (via Twitter) whether HP had ever made such a device.

No they didn’t!

— Nick Earle (@nearle) August 2, 2017

David Jastrow, HP Keynote embraces ecosystem thinking (CRN, 15 June 2000). I have corrected the misspelling of Earle’s surname.

Thomas Lee, Best Buy’s new chief is selling from Day 1 (Star Tribune, 8 September 2012)

Ann Zimmerman, Can Retailers Halt ‘Showrooming’? (Wall Street Journal, 11 April 2012) (paywall)

Wikipedia: IPhone (1st generation), Showrooming (retrieved 15 July 2017)

Related Posts: Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking (Feb 2004) Showrooming (Label)

Updated 2 August 2017

Management, Simple and Wrong – Semantics, Systems, and Self-Correction

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IBM Jumps Into RPA Market With Automation Anywhere – Perhaps A Turn To More Practical Challenges

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IBM and Automation Anywhere (AA’s) today announced a collaboration (note-not a formal partnership yet) to integrate (AA’s) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, used to create software bots to handle repetitive, task-based work, with IBM’s portfolio of digital process automation software, that includes IBM Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager. For AA, the partnership is a validation of its strong position in the RPA market, as shown in the Forrester Q1 RPA wave. For IBM, the partnership will enable clients to use AA’s RPA platform to create software bots that execute tasks within larger business processes managed by IBM’s software. Here’s our take.

IBM Can Add Smarts to AA’s RPA Platform

RPA works in a very dumb fashion today – mimicking human keystrokes and mouse movements – where all decisions must be explicitly programmed into the script. The result is that there are very few real decisions made beyond simple logic loops. Watson will be relevant down the road, but as a first step, RPA will benefit from IBM’s mature business rules engine (Decision Manager) or the embedded rules in the BPM platform. But as interesting, IBM’s content analytics, if part of teh collaboration, can allow AA to keep pace with unstructured RPA intelligence from Workfusion and other RPA competitors moving quickly in that direction. RPA use cases that comb through unstructured content will be ahead of chatbot and AI-based digital workers.

Further Market Validation For RPA

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IBM Jumps Into RPA Market With Automation Anywhere — Perhaps A Turn To More Practical Challenges

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IBM and Automation Anywhere  (AA’s) today announced a collaboration (note-not a formal partnership yet) to integrate (AA’s) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, used to create software bots to handle repetitive, task-based work, with IBM’s portfolio of digital process automation software, that includes IBM Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager. For AA, the partnership is a validation of […]

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