“If they had vision they might have been in the role Amazon is in today.”
I have no clue how the publisher of the biggest distribution of catalogs in the WORLD could see the internet and say “Nah. Not for us.”
Year after year. They could have owned online retailing from 1991. They ignored it. They even ignored it 20 some odd years later when others were doing it.
Most of the technology you use today, email, network adapters, windows based OS and OOP was invented at Xerox. Look at them now....
At the beginning of the internet era, people didn’t know how Internet retailing would take off as it has .
Then again, once it became clear how profitable internet sales would be, retailers had to know that development of their internet presence would be a key to success.