Following on from the acquisition of Skype by Ebay, this weeks Economist leads with a prediction that everyone would have laughed at if it had been in Mondo 2000 ten years ago:
'the rise of Skype and other VOIP services means nothing less than the death of the traditional telephone business established over a century ago… the death of the trillion dollar voice telephony market… it is now no longer a question whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so'
What other sectors are toast:
2. Retail banking – retail banks are crap, expensive, lazy and complacent. Why do I have to mail pieces of paper that look like 19th century parchment 3000 miles to deposit virtual money via a building with travertine floors and 20 foot ceilings?
3. Photography – The number of art schools in Britain reflects the requirement for large numbers of illustrators to record the conquests of the early Victorians rather than a British aesthetic taste. These illustrators were replaced by photographers. The photographers will, in turn, largely be replaced by amateurs given that digital photography achieves quality through unlimited quantity. The good photographers will survive, but the army of mediocrity that still shoot weddings on film to overcharge for the prints will be overtaken by editing the best shots from the army of guests with digital cameras.
4. The Music Industry – enough said. Except 5 years after Napster why are millions of people using iPods to spend the same amount of money to rent songs rather than own them? Perhaps those white cables lead to electrodes that slowly fry your brain leaving you as a blackened silhouette – like the billboards show.
5. Suburbia – the railways created them and cars extended them, but the donut effect will kill them. Inner suburbs will become ghettos as the young middle class populate the former inner city industrial areas and those who are older, with families hook up to broadband internet, liaise with China and India and commute a couple of days a week to the office from real countryside.
6. Realtors – An architect spends 7 years training and gets up to 16% for designing a house and then is liable for 12 years. A realtor with 3 months training, who doesn't know a cornice from a corniche, gets up to 1.5% for opening the door and opening his/her mouth without any liability. The good news is that it wont be for long, eventually cartel-like operations such as Manhattan realtors will be disintermediated by more efficient online marketplaces. Hahahaha.
7. Walmart – Walmart has Woolworths written all over it. As a portal into the People's Republic of China staffed by Mexicans, its a pretty weird place to be frequented by people from Kansas. Its demise wont have much to do with the Internet, except in that it epitomises the last hurrah of the way things were in retail. They should buy Amazon.
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tags: [predictions]