Does anyone know if Sears Israel still exists ? Their website is still up but but says that SHC has 178,000 employees. Very outdated number. SI itself claims 124 employees. This is a very obscure part of Sears.
16 replies (most recent on top)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3750042,00.html Closing Israel office.
This is @1qsn again. Just to clarify, I (and probably some of the other replies after) was responding to a comment that consisted of a massive screenful of "BWAHAHA" over and over again, after one or two sentences of other nonsense that made it sound like that person had completely misunderstood the previous comment. That garbage post has now been removed.
@gif I can red reel good thank u
If you read their website, it seems clear their primary role was to code SYW. Given what others have said on this board about SYW being gutted, it doesn't seem like this has a bright future.
@eli 0 points for reading comprehension
@RPO if you spent more time,or maybe knew what the eff you were doing you wouldn't blame marketing for your team's incompetence.
nah, the first part was cut from the same article too
Great contribution to the thread. :rolleyes: There is no "you" here who worked on Alfie. After the first few lines in @rpo's post ("Unfortunately, I’m dumb, I don’t understand the technical specificity and I’ll skip this part. But I wanted to admit that the system of orders was very interesting."), they pasted part of the cache of the now-deleted article from the person in Israel who worked on Alfie.
Unfortunately, I’m dumb, I don’t understand the technical specificity and I’ll skip this part. But I wanted to admit that the system of orders was very interesting. The team worked on AI, but for the correct working process, we needed the data about users behavior during the order process. How could we solve the data problem? We made a temporary system where the order is sent to Sears through the real human support center.
It was a great challenge for me as a product designer, I got a chance to work with the awesome team on the product outside the comfort zone. I think we made a huge step forward as the professionals from the different working areas such as management, development and design. The final product Kenmore Alfie was presented on the Sears’ websites and it was one of the cheapest smart gadgets for the shopping from the home as the recommended price was only $19.99.
Unfortunately, even a good product can fail because the success of the product not only in hands of developers but in hands of the marketing team too. Sears’ marketing team didn’t make their work as it should be done, they didn’t prepare the press releases for the online media, didn’t work with the tech trendsetters and when the Kenmore Alfie was presented no one did know about it (I mean the users outside the Sears’ websites). Alfie was on sale only for two years and the Sears HQ didn’t make anything for the product evolution- they stopped updating the app and didn’t work on the new versions of the gadget with the improved software. I left Sears in April 2016 and I accidentally found out that the gadget was already released (you see, I was a part of the team, but even I didn’t know about it).
As I said at the beginning, it was a great time and I worked with the awesome people and I would like to thank those with whom I worked on Alfie, who made me more professional and gave me a chance to struggle with my fears:
weird that the article seems to have been deleted, and recently too, since it's still accessible on Google cache.
Yep. They imagined it having a real AI/voice-recognition system but Sears never bothered to finish developing it. Read what one of the designers had to say: https://medium.com/@dpolevoy/design-9ae68e6615a7
@dgh was that the personal concierge Amazon Echo clone that had the brilliant idea of having actual people order for you instead of AI because Sears is too technically dumb to do anything like that?
IIRC, Israel was responsible for developing the abysmal Alfie.
They used to be called Delver back in the day before they were acquired, and they were a collossal pain in the a-- to deal with.
I heard they got cut, but not sure if that's accurate.
From what I can tell it's really just a social networking company Sears acquired.