10 things that won't survive the recession

10 things that won't survive the recession

Tight times, and budgets, will hasten the end for some things

By Mike Elgan

December 23, 2008


The government says we've been in a recession for the past year. Experts say it'll be at least another year before it's over. And everybody says it's the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.



Nice sound bite. What does that mean?

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Who knows? We can be sure that this downturn will differ totally from the Depression, and also different from the many recessions we've suffered every decade or every other decade since the '30s. I'm not an economist or a historian, but it seems to me that this recession will be something unprecedented.

One reason is that that there was no Internet or mobile technology in the 1930s. That means individual people and companies have very low-cost, high-efficiency alternatives for doing a wide range of activities. That will accelerate the demise of those things fated to be replaced anyway.

Here are 10 things that I believe won't survive the recession.

1. Free tech support
The practice still employed by some companies of paying humans to answer phones and solve technical problems with hardware or software purchased for consumers will become a thing of the past. PCs, laptops, and hardware peripherals, as well as application software -- these categories will be purchased like airline tickets, with price becoming the sole criteria for many buyers. In order to compete on price, companies who now offer real tech support will replace it with message boards (users helping users), wikis, wizards, software-based troubleshooting tools, and other unsatisfying alternatives.

2. Wi-Fi you have to pay for
Everyone is going to share the cost of public Wi-Fi because the penny-pinching public will gravitate to places that offer "free" Wi-Fi. Companies that charge extra for Wi-Fi will see their iPhone, BlackBerry, and netbook-toting customers -- i.e., everybody -- taking business elsewhere. The only place you'll pay for Wi-Fi will be on an airplane.

3. Landline phones
Digital phone bundles for homes (where TV, home networking, and landline phone service are offered in a total package) will keep the landline idea alive for a while, but as millions of households drop their cable TV services and as consumers look to cut all needless costs, the trend toward dropping landline service in favor of cell phone service only will accelerate until it's totally mainstream, and only grandma still has a landline phone.

4. Movie rental stores
The idea of retail stores where you drive there, pick a movie, stand in line, and drive home with it will become a quaint relic of the new fin de siecle (look it up!). The new old way to get movies will be discs by mail, and the new, new way will be downloading.

5. Web 2.0 companies without a business plan
The era when Web-based companies could emerge and grow on venture capital, collecting eyeballs and members at a rapid clip and deferring the business plan until later are dead and gone. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Twitter. Sand Hill Road-style venture capital is shrinking toward nothing, and investors in general will be hard to come by. Those few remaining investors will want to see real, solid business plans before the first dollar is wired to any startup's bank.

Interesting list.

I might add one of my own...Gasoline Service Stations.

www.infoworld.com...

[edit on 28-12-2008 by whiteraven]

Great thread!
Can you post the rest of the list? (for those of us who don't believe in mandatory registration at news sites). . Grr.

6. Most companies in Silicon Valley
Tech company failures and mergers will leave the industry with a low two-digit percentage (maybe 25 percent) of the total number of companies now in existence. Like the automobile industry, which had more than 200 car makers in the 1920s and emerged from the Depression with just a few, Silicon Valley is in for some serious contraction. The difference is that the auto industry ended up with the Big Three, whereas the number of tech companies will grow dramatically again during the next boom.

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7. Palm Inc.
Elevation Partners, which has among its principals U2 lead singer Bono, pumped a whopping $100 million into the failing Palm Inc. this week.

The idea is to give the company time to release its forthcoming Nova operating system, which will take the cell phone world by storm and give Apple a run for its money. It would have been far more efficient, however, to just flush that money down the toilet. With the iPhone setting the handset interface agenda, BlackBerry maker RIM kicking butt in the businesses market, and Google stirring up trouble with its Android platform, this is no time for a clueless company like Palm to be introducing a new operating system. By this time next year, Palm will be gone. And so might Elevation Partners.

8. Yahoo
Yahoo is another company that can't seem to do anything right. Or, at least, can't compete with Google. Yahoo will be acquired by someone, and its brand will become an empty shell -- used for some inane set of services but appreciated only by armchair historians (joining the ranks of Netscape, Napster, and Commodore).

9. Half of all retail stores
Many retail stores are obsolete and will be replaced by online competitors. Entire malls will become ghost towns. By this time next year, most video game stores, book stores and toy stores -- as well as many other categories -- will simply vanish. Amazon.com will grow and grow.

10. Satellite radio
I'm sorry, Howard Stern. It's over. The newly merged Sirius XM Radio simply cannot sustain its losses. The company is already deeply in debt and would need to dramatically increase subscribers over the next six months in order to meet its debt obligations. Unfortunately, new car sales, where a huge percentage of satellite radios are sold, are in the gutter and stand-alone subscriptions are way down.

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Change is hard. But efficiency is good. While boom years gives us radical innovation and improve consumer choice, recessions help us focus on what's really important and accelerate the demise of technologies and companies that are already obsolete.

So say good-bye to these 10 things, and say hello (eventually) to a new economy, a new boom and a new way of doing things.

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. He blogs about the technology needs, desires and successes of mobile warriors in his Computerworld blog, The World Is My Office. Contact Mike at [email protected], follow him on Twitter or his blog, The Raw Feed. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

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reply to post by clay2 baraka

4. Movie rental stores
The idea of retail stores where you drive there, pick a movie, stand in line, and drive home with it will become a quaint relic of the new fin de siecle (look it up!). The new old way to get movies will be discs by mail, and the new, new way will be downloading.

Disagree. Maybe in huge urban areas this will happen, but I believe the smaller town Blocbuster & Hollywood video stores will be alive & well. Especially if people start cutting their cable TV to save money. We'll see a massive return to the 80's practice of payday movie rental nights. When I was growing up my folks rented videos every other Friday night, as did almost all of my friends' parents. I figure this trend will continue.

I also hope that #10 is wrong. Could care less about Stern, but I'd be more than a little peeved if SiriusXM goes belly up and I can no longer get my Opie & Anthony fix every day.

Originally posted by burdman30ott6

Disagree. Maybe in huge urban areas this will happen, but I believe the smaller town Blocbuster & Hollywood video stores will be alive & well. Especially if people start cutting their cable TV to save money. We'll see a massive return to the 80's practice of payday movie rental nights. When I was growing up my folks rented videos every other Friday night, as did almost all of my friends' parents. I figure this trend will continue.

Rental stores will soon be a thing of the past. It's because of the effectiveness of mail-rental services such as NetFlix. An online supplier can provide a rental service without the increasing overhead of maintaining retail locations, not to mention a much-reduced payroll expense.

Simply put, retail rental stores will be out priced, as we will see happen with other sorts of retail businesses as they are displaced by online commerce.

[edit on 12/29/2008 by clay2 baraka]

Brick and Mortar is in death throws.

We cannot save them.

They may survive another 10years but soon the outdated models will be almost gone except for some circus sideshow acts and a few walmart kind of things..........................................


unless we end up BOGS....beyond organizational goverment services...then we go the other way...local economy.

The question is how far...

Originally posted by burdman30ott6

4. Movie rental stores
The idea of retail stores where you drive there, pick a movie, stand in line, and drive home with it will become a quaint relic of the new fin de siecle (look it up!). The new old way to get movies will be discs by mail, and the new, new way will be downloading.

Disagree. Maybe in huge urban areas this will happen, but I believe the smaller town Blocbuster & Hollywood video stores will be alive & well. Especially if people start cutting their cable TV to save money. We'll see a massive return to the 80's practice of payday movie rental nights.

Unfortunately, this is very wrong. Perhaps smaller town video stores will survive a little longer, but as the last of Gen X holdouts converts over to digital download -- or at least give up going to vid stores and just rent those dollar DVDs at WalMart kiosks -- the last of the video rental stores will go the way of the Dodo.

My father-in-law is just about to shutter what has been the oldest video store in Atlanta by the end of the year. This was an institution within a very affluent suburban community that had a huge loyal customer base and a deep history of titles you can't even find on Amazon.com. Alas, it too is a victim of New Media trends.

Look, I'm not like some of those trend abortionists from the past that proclaimed newspapers' death with the advent of radio, the advent of t.v. and now the advent and maturation of the Internet.

And we're not talking the death of movies; we're simply talking about the extinction of a channel in which to get those movies -- a channel that is outmoded, inefficient, expensive. And for people like you and me, the experience of going to and browsing through a video store is a generational attachment. Kids today (whoever would have thought I'd be saying that?) just don't have the same attachment.

Where in Atlanta?

I loved and lived in Atlanta for a year or so!

Yes.....we will see some changes...some that we have not even dreamed of.

I am hoping we can somehow come to terms with the fact that we need to heal mother earth as we build the "new" ifrastructure here in North America.

One other thing that will not survive the coming depression:

the NWO... No money to make the stupid ivory tower dream a reality.

I was hoping that much of Hollywood and most of the pro sports would fail as well. If they failed imagine how much better informed people might become. They may actually start to wake up and look around at things happening right in front of them.

Raist

reply to post by whiteraven


You just reminded me of another thing I hope doesn't survive the recession: Handcuffing our growth under the guise of pseudoscience and uneducated guesses about the environment. The global warming fear mongering has run its course and the time has come for this country to say "Enough!" and back away from ridiculous regulations, environmental taxes that drive prices artificially high, and general productivity malaise inspired in the name of Al Gore's bullcrap.

When peoples' livelihoods start suffering because of the little speckled hoot owl which may or may not be slightly less proliffic compared with its range 8,000 years ago, then it has gone too far. The same is true for the unproven theory (in fact, the theory right now appears to be total crap) of man driven global warming and this country's prosperity.

Originally posted by Raist
I was hoping that much of Hollywood and most of the pro sports would fail as well. If they failed imagine how much better informed people might become. They may actually start to wake up and look around at things happening right in front of them.

The result of what you were hoping for would probably be more like mass insanity, riots, killings, etc. Man needs diversions. Most people (myself included) wouldn't become "more informed" if there was an end to sports & televised diversions... we'd become alcoholic, stoned fishermen, hunters, hikers, and probably videogame addicts... uh, OK... some of us already are most of those things even with sports & TV, but you get the idea.

reply to post by burdman30ott6

You just reminded me of another thing I hope doesn't survive the recession: Handcuffing our growth under the guise of pseudoscience and uneducated guesses about the environment. The global warming fear mongering has run its course and the time has come for this country to say "Enough!" and back away from ridiculous regulations, environmental taxes that drive prices artificially high, and general productivity malaise inspired in the name of Al Gore's bullcrap.

I see your side.

Yet the earth has suffered much in the name of profit.

What most do not come to realize is the idea that we live because the earth lives.

As we rebuild lets do it in harmony with the earth rather then raping the earth.

By Grandfather who farmed in Saskatchewan knew this. He rested his land.

He planted groves of trees and bushes to capture snow and moisture and to keep topsoil from blowing away.

He summerfallowed with the idea of renewal of his land.

We are so far removed from where/how/why we are able to live on this fragile planet that most do not connect veal with a cute calf. lol

So yes..I agree...to a degree...and that degree would be if we profit in death of earth, each other, if we do not replenish renewable resources then it is of no profit.

I am not a tree hugger....nor a left wing nut...I am as far right as one can go.....almost..i believe in less almost no goverment.

lol

I full of optimism for the future.....and I gave my daughters Beaver/Moose Mucklucks for Christmas and Rabbit/moose/beaver mitts.

I am also looking at buying a 300 dollar Wolverine pelt for my own enjoyment. lol

And I want the rivers and streams that the beaver/moose etc live in to be pure/life giving and I want my 3 daughters and my soon to be son to enjoy the wild lands I live in and near.

Peace to you bird.








[edit on 30-12-2008 by whiteraven]

Originally posted by burdman30ott6
The result of what you were hoping for would probably be more like mass insanity, riots, killings, etc. Man needs diversions. Most people (myself included) wouldn't become "more informed" if there was an end to sports & televised diversions... we'd become alcoholic, stoned fishermen, hunters, hikers, and probably videogame addicts... uh, OK... some of us already are most of those things even with sports & TV, but you get the idea.

Actually some of the things you listed would be good for people as it would get them off the couch and they might get into better shape.

Hunting, fishing, hiking, or just about any hobby could give a person the same enjoyment as most of the junk on the TV or the overpaid steroid freaks we call pro athletes. The sports thing being gone might even get people out playing the sports themselves instead of plopping down in front of the TV. It would be great if people went out a played themselves instead of living through someone else.

I don’t have a real problem with either as a form of temporary entertainment, but I would like to see people becoming more active, or at least try and expand their minds more. Even though it may not seem like it debating and discussing on ATS at least can keep your mind more active than watching TV or sports all day.

But sadly you are right in some ways I think there would be an uprising because people would have to entertain themselves.

Raist

Originally posted by whiteraven
Interesting list.

I might add one of my own...Gasoline Service Stations.

www.infoworld.com...

What? How did you come to that conclusion? How would people power their cars then?

Just a wild whim of my own. ha!

What I should have done is explained that service stations may undergo a major "change" as cars move from gas only to Gas/electric or gas/hydrp etc as

1. Less gas use means less stations

2. Gas/other energy source means retooled service stations.

So, to be more specific service stations will undergo "change"..."Yes we can" lol

As far as major sports going by the wayside. They are already talking about NASCAR's future as being bleek because of sponsorship problems. Racing in its entirety is suffering in all the major venues. F1 and all their classes are getting notices of sponsors bailing on contracts. SCCA is saying that they are seeing less entries in all their events or major cutbacks in participation. Being a gearhead myself, I'm a little worried! The rest of that list I'm not too worried about other than the job problem if it comes to fruition!! The Tech drain might backfire on us!

Zindo

Interesting list but I disagree with two of the items. Land-line phones and malls.

If you have ever been in a weather or civic emergency, you know that sometimes the land-line phones are the only ones that work, as the cell networks quickly become over-loaded by the call volume.

Additionally, it's only the traditional form of indoor malls that is dead. It will be replaced by what is sometimes called a "life-style center" - outdoor, main street or village style retail establishments clustered together for easy drive-up access by patrons. Focus groups and business stats show that these forms of businesses generate more dollars per transaction while using less payroll than traditional malls. People will always need goods and services and they have to get them somewhere. With the exception of Amazon, on-line sales were down across the board. When a dollar is hard to come by, people tend to want to spend it safely, and that often means face to face, locally.

reply to post by kosmicjack


I hope your right about the ' life style center' concept. It might just bring back the downtown areas of these small towns with boarded up building that used to be the mainstay of American life. It would be nice to see Wallyworld get the short end of the stick for a change and bring back the family run business downtown experience!

Zindo

reply to post by whiteraven


Brick and Motar will survive, sense you didnt go into what type of store food stores will surive, I dont think anyone will want to order food over the net wait couple days then get it; Lots of people like to pick there fruits and vegetables to ensure there not damaged, rotten or on there way to being rotten.


Voip (Comcast Digital phone, Vonage, etc) are the new landlines but I will never go to that, I have had power outages and internet outages while if they both go out a landline will still work atleast the backup power at the phone company fails but the power usually comes back on before that happens

Downloading will not be the only way for games,movies, music etc especally if companies continue to put caps on bandwidth and slow speeds.
I see software, music, movies etc on flash memory

If the US had internet speeds the way of Japan or South Korea you could say its over but not until then. I dont see no one downloading 4-10 GB files over the internet speeds we have in the US it would still take hours at our highest speeds and it would still be quicker to just go to the store and purchase the phyiscal product.

I see stuff on flash memory or kiosk that you pick what you want and they get it for there on CD, DVD or flash memory I dont see us going to complete downloads for atleast 10-15 years

Most companies that sell products through digital downloads are doing it for there benefit not ours, because they can still charge the same price with no production cost to them.

Companies will surive just like they are before this, the new way to survive is say your going green and that means less packaging less product same price example look at food packaging and other products the boxes and dropping Kellogs cereals are dropping 3 or 4 oz's but they have the same price and other companies are doing similar things to give you less but for the same price.

In the next 2-5 years I see

What i really see if ethernet jacks replacing phone jacks, with like a modern connected and from that they plug into your phone , computer, TV, game system etc.

Software available as digital downloads and on flash memory
(sd & micro sd cards) more flash memory and USB ports on computers, tv's, dvd/bluray etc the replacement of cd/dvd/bluray with flash cards.

Ford, GM other car companies making Buses and trains/lightrail/trolleys for the state & city government to set up transit system and to get less people owning cars.

More Walmart like super stores where you get everything you need in one place.

Companies using stuff like going green to get consumers to pay more and reducing amount in products. Look at food companies less packaging less food same price. Electronic companies more evironmental safe higher price . In both cases the company doesnt a give a flying you know what about the environment.

[edit on 1-1-2009 by kvaniu]