This is part two (part I ) of my take on Seth Godin’s proclamations.
The number of new products introduced every day is five times greater than now And the vast majority of them go completely unnoticed. Add to this the new means of distributing TV content and the media scream gets louder and less intelligible. People will come to depend on aggregators. These are people who watch particular segments of the new product market and put the cool stuff out there for their readers.
I’d expect to see some scandals and out cry as product providers go for these gatekeepers and their readers get mad when they find out someone was paid to place a product. Most of the hoo haa though will be moot if the aggregators continue to provide quality information. I don’t really car if Icon Productions paid my favorite movie critic/aggregator to review their new remake of the Ten Commandments, as long has the review is accurate.
Wal-Mart’s sales are three times as big Wal-Mart will always be the king of cheap. As more stuff gets cheap, they will sell more stuff. They aren’t the people to go to when you want something cool or complicated.
Wal-Mart is also where the masses, and especially the poor, shop. Do the millions of new products rate selling at Wal-Mart? Or are the often going to be non-commodity items?
Any manufactured product that’s more than five years old in design sells at commodity pricing Assuming it is a commodity and it survives. Most things won’t survive that long and other things are unique creations, for example music, movies and art. Wal-Mart won’t be so central when we get most of these online. And as the proliferation of old TV shows on DVD have shown, even when it is old it can still have non-commodity value.
The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now My bet is it will be even older than that, but the average job will actually be smaller. Many people will build careers that allow them to work less as they get older. So they work longer, but less.
Your current profession will either be gone or totally different I kind of agree with this. All careers will be different when the media landscape changes. But doctors will still be trying to make people well. Lawyers will still be suing people. Computer programmers will still be solving problems with technology. How they do it may be different, but what they do will still be the same.
When I first read this my thought was, “And owning real estate is still a good idea”. None of these changes cause people not to need a place to live. Nor does it change a need for food and water. Nor a desire for sex or companionship. People will still go to church and have hobbies. How we do things may have changed a lot in the last few years, but what we do is still around.