(2017-04-24) Evans Ten Year Futures

Ben Evans: Ten Year Futures: Electric and autonomous cars (DriverlessCar) will change cities, virtual and Mixed Reality will change the entire computing experience, and Machine Learning is changing the kind of questions that computers can answer. But each of these is also just beginning,

I think we can see a set of changes that come not so much from any new technology as from shifts in consumer behaviour and operating economics. These changes are potentially just as big, and might be starting sooner. (BandWagon)

First, E-Commerce, having grown more or less in a straight line for the past twenty years, is starting to reach the point that broad classes of retailer have real trouble. It's useful to compare physical retail (BigRetail) with NewsPapers, which face many of the same problems: a fixed cost base with falling revenues, the near-disappearance of a physical distribution advantage, and above all, unbundling and disaggregation. Everything bad that the internet did to media is probably going to happen to retailers.

All of this change affects huge pools of capital. There is retail itself, and TV, and then there is the whole world of Advertising.