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Ask Slashdot: Which Businesses Will Go Away In the Next 10 Years? (nbcnews.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Ten years ago NBC published a list of business types that it predicted would disappear in the following decade. Ten years later and we can see how good their fortune telling was. What businesses do you think will go away by 2027? Who is destined to become the next buggy whip manufacturer, whose demand dried up due to changing technology and a changing world?
For reference, NBC's list was: Record stores; Camera film manufacturing; Crop dusters; Gay bars; Newspapers; Pay phones; Used bookstores; Piggy banks; Telemarketing; Coin-operated arcades.
For reference, NBC's list was: Record stores; Camera film manufacturing; Crop dusters; Gay bars; Newspapers; Pay phones; Used bookstores; Piggy banks; Telemarketing; Coin-operated arcades.
just kidding, lighten up
Table-ized A.I.
I think it's going to take more than 10 years for that to happen.
OP made a stupid (but funny) comment, but Universities and places of higher learning could be under the pump as students don't even bother to show up for lectures and instead watch recordings instead.
http://www.news.com.au/finance...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
After all, once immigration is ended once and for all, who needs a lawyer?
... crop dusters still dust, film is making a comeback, telemarketers are still here and are still going to hell ;~)
I think it'd be far more likely for Mozilla to disappear long before Google does.
Firefox is the only product of Mozilla's that really sees much use, and even it's losing market share. The latest browser stats show it has only about 5% of the market now, and essentially no presence in the mobile market (0.04%!).
If I'm not mistaken, their search deal with Yahoo expires in 2019. Given Yahoo's state, and Firefox's almost non-existent market share, I wouldn't be optimistic about it being extended.
After that, the rest of Mozilla's products could, in my opinion, be seen as failures, including Persona, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Thunderbird, and Pocket. I can't really see how any of them help bring in revenue.
What's their greatest accomplishment as of late? Obfuscating their logo into "moz://a"!
I think the future looks very bleak for Mozilla.
I suspect that's more on the 30 year timeframe, as I still see cars built in the 1980s and 1990s on the road, and only the rich can afford electric so far.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Poorly maintained forums that get sold from sucker in search of advertising revenue to sucker in search of advertising revenue. Doubly so if they don't support unicode (or if they do).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Now, admittedly, they may not be used for the same thing as they originally were, but the market is increasing.
I'd tend to say the following:
1. Repair stations (not tire shops) - electric cars and trucks need about half as much maintenance and a lot of it is instrument driven. A good way to diversify is add bike repairs to one of your bays, or a chai/bubble tea store.
2. Single gender bathrooms in retail. Most places can't really afford having separate facilities, so you'll probably see most places just have a room with both fixtures. Exception: bars, restaurants.
3. Fear based local TV news. Unhappy, scared people don't buy stuff. And TV is mostly dead.
4. Food delivery and prepackaged meal delivery services. Those that survive will transition to restaurant delivery. Uber will vaporize as drones replace on demand delivery.
5. Furniture places. 2025-2035 will see most people getting smaller places and getting rid of large furniture. Exception: couches, chairs. Best to diversify into Tiny Home style furniture that incorporates storage into the furniture (dual use furniture).
6. Expensive spicy food places. As Americans age into retirees they will start wanting to go to diner type places. This won't kill ethnic foods, but a lot of current restaurants will suddenly lose foot traffic, as retirees don't eat out that much. Nobody will miss them.
7. Parking garages. The combination of on demand self driving vehicles, more retirees, more cyclists, more pedestrians, and quiet electric transit will kill off a lot of parking garages and the attached malls. Nobody will miss them, except us skateboarders.
8. Single family home lawn supplies. Lawns will be replaced by gardens and more people will live in multi-family towers next to green parks. But plants will be in high demand for the apartments and decks. Tiny greenhouses too.
9. Cell phone stores. The 2025-2035 period will see ubiquitous self-powered wifi devices (like ST comms badges) that run off incidental radiation, and attach to clothes (either as sleeves, belts, broaches, or necklaces. This will save jewelry stores, of course.
10. Wallets. See 9 above. The new devices will mostly replace wallets and purses. People will wear nifty gem sacks at their belts, in which they store their coins (see how Canada does dollars, or Euro coins).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Gun stores.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comments here are for the US (mostly...)
Fast food chain burger flipper -- replaced by a robot. There still will be employees at the stores, just a bunch less. Minimum wage laws have made their work too expensive.
More and more agricultural crop picking work will be automated. Especially if Trump continues to clamp down on illegal immigration. Growers either won't be able to find workers, or the workers that remain will want too much money.
And this will apply in a lot of other places as well. More and more low-end jobs across all sectors will be replaced by robotics and/or AI. (Except government. That will continue to be bloated, corrupt, and inefficient as ever.)
If wireless internet access becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, at some point that becomes the end of AM/FM and satellite radio. (I love Sirius/XM, but if they survive, it will be through relatively cheap Internet streaming, not their expensive satellite systems.) Some content remains, but it's now all streamed/podcasted.
As both wireless and wired Internet access become cheaper and more ubiquitous, at some point that becomes the end of satellite/cable TV distribution. TV becomes distributed via the Internet instead (as already is the case several services).
Wired phone lines (POTS) become more or less dead as well. And the phone companies largely are happy about that. They don't want to have to maintain that infrastructure, and rather make money in wireless and Internet offerings.
Newspapers continue their demise. They aren't dead yet, but most (with a few exceptions) are doing terribly. Same with most magazines. 10 years from now, things will be even more bleak.
Bookstores, except for used ones, die out. Used ones remain as a niche, as their product is cheap, and include collectors items. And they can be largely a warehouse for their online operations as well, selling books via Amazon and eBay.
Despite environmentalist daydreams, gas and diesel engines will still be around and still be way most new vehicles are powered. But coal power plants will be dwindling, probably not all gone. Cheap natural gas and better solar will make dirty coal more and more unattractive. Cheap natural gas is already doing this right now.
The country of Venezuela will be gone, at least as we know it. But it's probably going to be gone in the next year or two, and maybe less, crashing from its own failures.
The article's headline said that these were businesses "facing extinction in ten years." In reality, very few (if any) of the businesses they identified actually are extinct.
Within the article, they did include weasel language under almost every single item to the effect that "it will be around, but their business will decline." Of course, if they had headlined their article "10 businesses that will decline in the next 10 years," nobody would have given it a second glance.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
they'll get eaten alive by a vulture capital firm in a leveraged buyout. Just happened to Toys-R-Us. I figure a few more retailers are next. Maybe one of the remaining sporting goods stores.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not as a market, but the new AIs will hunt them down.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just kidding. Lobbying will be a growth industry for the next decade at least.
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exactly, though most gas stations already have convenience stores attached to them.
(No explanation needed.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Drivers, burger flippers, mechanics,
What company will disapear? Uber! You cannot loose money on every trip forever.
Please, for the love of the gods, please let this stop being a profession.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
NBC did not do a good job predicting:
2/10 = 20% is not a good rate of prediction
No worries, mate. As soon as any given business becomes obsolete, the hipsters will rush to rediscover it, pay 10x the old price for its products, and make it fashionably cool again. It's the circle of life.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Goodbye NBC, we hardly watched you...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
One can only hope it doesn't take 10 years.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Other than the one that I own, I've never seen another electric car on the road.
It's interesting how Peak Oil has disappeared from the collective consciousness in discussions about the not too distant future. News Flash: Peak Oil is here. And Peak Natural Gas is less than 10 years out. When you consider how integrally woven petroleum is to most developed nation economies -- and Capitalism in general -- plus it's role in climate change, major upheavals across all sorts of businesses should be expected. Cheap, portable alternatives to gas and diesel are going to be hard to find for things like airplanes, container ships, and construction equipment. Also, energy-intensive activities like mining, paving and concrete production will likely get very expensive. It's going to be interesting times..
Ther will probably still be some business entity around called Microsoft but it will be fully owned by the Chinese and will just be an IP troll.
It will be pretty much irrelevant and insignificant in any real sense, They won't be making or selling any actual products by then.
When all its principals are jailed...
I'm not being optimistic about renewable energy use or the will of the government to stop pollution, it's just that natural gas has been gutting the coal industry and despite a recent uptick, automation is replacing most workers. The companies may survive another 7 years but the occupation as we know it will die. With no economic incentive (jobs) to keep the sector alive, politicians that aren't heavily bribed will turn on coal completely most likely by other growing sectors that bribe them better.
Here's the long trend and here's the more recent trend.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When are we going to see electric semi-trucks?
A small, convenient electric car for a family is something you can happily recharge overnight. A semi. to drive for a day on electricity alone hauling a trailer with steel, and recharge overnight? Not gonna happen in the next 5-8 years at least, and to replace the existing fleets allow two more decades if you look optimistically.
Gas stations may change the profile, but trucks will need oil for a long time yet.
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Lenevo and Tata will purchase the remnants.
Co's won't invest in much automation R&D unless the labor actually does dry up.
Table-ized A.I.
If the facebook has its way with virtual reality then the worlds oldest business will vanish. Cross physical feed back with AI then things get ... creepy.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Record stores have bounced back, photographic film has bounced back, and telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
How about Microsoft merge with Oracle and then merge with Comcast and Spectrum and AT&T, and then the whole ball of flaming shit burns a painful ugly death live streaming for everybody to see and dance to. Hell, I might even leave the basement to witness it in person.
Table-ized A.I.
In fact, some of those are actually on a massive rise due to recent retro trends. Arcades and more specifically Barcades are popping up all over the place now. Film cameras are as of 2017 just starting to make a retro comeback as well. Used book stores seem to be doing just fine, too. Amazon only killed off retailers, not the second hand market. In fact, vinyl records also has a surge going on right now. So like almost half their list is currently being fueled by nostalgia into new market territory.
Records stores are doing just fine. Vinyl is back in a big way, and as someone who has a ton of it I'm thrilled about it. Vinyl purchasers are pretty eclectic/odd folks in general, so there's a pervasive mindset that supports local stores when it's possible (like the Record Store Day events, and black Friday releases). My local stores have live music and all kinds of other events to make it more of an experience, plus for the most part these guys know they are terminally dependent on the people that support them, so they tend to be pretty cool folks. The linked list was crap, none of that has come to pass as they laid it out, it's in the "well but it might also" trailing categories for almost all of their points.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Ten years? We're talking legacy here. How about 100 years?
Here's one that's already dying, and should continue to wither: the monologue-centric academic lecture hall.
Here's another one that will take more than ten years but is already happening: the death of cooking (esp. baking) in U.S. volumetric units.
No-one in the younger generation thinks accurate digital scales are exotic any longer. And what if you want to make 50% more? And the original recipe calls for 1 1/2 tsp? Oh, dear. So what, apart from inertia, keeps us locked into this weirdly discrete measurement system?
Answer: whole chicken eggs sold in the shell.
That could change, too, but I'm not counting this as an official answer.
All these old printed cookbooks call for one onion. Seen an onion lately? I've picked up 10 lb bags from Costo, where every onion was 450–500 g. Seen a mushroom lately? Where I live, back in the 1980s, a mushroom was one inch across. A quarter cut was almost diced. Now I'm usually doing an 8-cut, and sometimes doing a 12-cut.
Everything in grams. It's more durable. Please and thank you.
Telemarketing: they got this one right by predicting it would still be around in lesser form;
I won't give them this one, because they didn't predict that lesser form would be of the criminal variety, and yet still manage to generate the same or greater volume of calls. They thought do-not-call would kill the industry, not just make it go underground.
Their main failure was they didn't consider the demographics of the targetted consumer base: more senescent people, and more people with complex finances leaving them with frantic levels of concern and thus emotionally vulnerable.
Someone had to do it.
'nuff said
Lectures are only part of the curriculum, and even they are more interactive these days. We've seen no real decline in interest in enrollment where I work, and have not had to reduce our admissions standards in quite some time.
Someone had to do it.
Neither Google, Apple, nor Amazon will be around in their current form. All will be broken up in various overseas monopoly trials.
electric cars still have other limitations: short range and slow charge time.
The range is good enough for 99% of the time. For the other 1%, I can rent a gas car.
The charge time doesn't matter because my car charges at 2 AM while I am sleeping.
In total, I spend a lot less time waiting for my car to charge than you spend at gas stations.
Other than the one that I own, I've never seen another electric car on the road.
That depends on where you live. In the South Bay, I see dozens every day.
San Jose has the most of any major city in America.
McAllen, TX has the least.
They are even less common in rural areas where the range can be a problem.
The number of lawsuits is just staggering!
665: The mark on the forehead of Satan's slightly less evil brother, Stan.
Hello, Groucho. Expanding on your observation...
For decades now, in the US the age of the average car has been rising. It has doubled since the Sixties; the average running registered car is now 12.4 years old. Cars don't wear out and rust like they used to. BTW, the average Driver is older too. People live and drive longer, and Teens no longer feel that desperate need to get a Learner's Permit six month's short of their 16th Birthday.
Now, assuming that we can freeze Demographics, among other things, ten years from now, the average car on the US roads will have been made somewhere around early Spring, 2015, and will probably be an SUV of some sort with a 200HP Gasoline Engine. There are only three things that will accelerate acceptance of Electric, and one is quite precise.
Between the end of the War and the 70's Gas Crises, the average new full size car was priced at 6 months of the Salary of the average working person, with "Economy" cars coming in at ~50% of that price. Which means that a Full size Electric Car needs to be around $25K, and an Electric Econobox needs to be ~$13K, in adjusted 2017 Dollars. People simply won't buy what they can't afford. Only around 5% of the US population buys a new car in a given year anyway, and this too has been relatively constant for decades.
The second thing that needs to happen is that Gas and Diesel needs to get very expensive. 1974 Gas Shortage expensive, so over $10 a Gallon, and it has to stay there for a few years. People simply won't buy what they can't afford, unless somebody comes up with a clever way to Lease Gasoline with minimal Down Payment and and billing stretched out over 5 years. Yup, Price Controls that disconnect the price of Gas with its actual cost, through various forms of Taxation. Oh, I can hear the howls of outrage from here...
Even then, there won't be enough Used Electric Cars to fill the need, because it still may not seem obvious at first, but New Car Sales are a very small part of the Market, and new Electric Car Sales are a very small part of that. Most people buy Used Cars. They always have.
The third thing that needs to happen is an accelerated Junker Program. Except for Electric Cars, no car over a decade old can be allowed on the roads, anywhere. Japan something like did this, with a funny result. Countries like Ireland and much of Eastern Europe was flooded with cheap reliable five-year old Japanese cars.
So a decade from now... yes, there will be more Electric Cars on the roads, but given current relatively Free Market conditions and purchasing trends, and without something like WWIII to muck everything up like last time, it will take, get this, _five decades_ before Electric cars outnumber the Internal Combustion ones. It's actually very simple math.
"You Can Trust Your Car To The Man Who Wears The Star." Gas stations have some life in them yet.
how are they correct on all counts? by my reading they were arguably wrong on all counts. maybe payphones you could give them, the rest are all wrong and some are even stronger now than they were back then.
Record stores have bounced back, photographic film has bounced back, and telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
I don't get bothered by any of these much any more, even telemarketing, but when will newspapers have the decency to die off? Someone started one up locally just a couple of months back and started tossing it onto everyone's driveway once a week. They don't even have the thoughtfulness to bring it on the morning of trash day.
Stay classy.
The number of gas stations has been declining for decades, due to rising efficiency, self-serve stations, and pumps that accept credit cards. Service stations - places that sell gas and repair cars - seem to have declined the most, while gas-and-snack places have risen in comparison.
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I would say that many of those businesses already died, and what we have now is the remaining niche after collapse. Just because we have automobiles and jet planes doesn't mean there isn't still a need for buggy whips.
But telemarketing? I wish they would die. They're like roaches, always hiding except for the times when they run past you.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Hardly a new prediction.
PCU came out in 94, universities are thriving just fine (far better even).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
There are a lot of peices to the puzzle of completely replacing fuel powered cars with electric ones. Making the cars cheaper and their range longer is certainly part of it but it's far from the only part.
Figuring out where people who don't live in a house with off street parking or people who are travelling for an extended period can charge their cars is one part. Ensuring the electricity grid can deal with the extra load is another.
Having said that I think you are right that largely gas stations won't turn into electric car charging stations. Firstly the low speed of electric charging requires much more land per vehicle served. Secondly having high current high voltage electric chargers in close proximity to dispensers for flammable liquids just seems like a bad idea from a safety perspective.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'd assume plug in hybrids with gas stations pretty much being limited to highways, and cities where people don't own a place to charge. Maybe rural areas, depends the range on battery.
I don't think gas stations will die, but they'll be for the people that can't afford a driveway/nice parking garage or on road trips.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I have a 12 minute commute in a smaller medium sized area (county about 45 minutes across with 500k people.
I see at least two different electric cars a week (a black Tesla model S, and a white model X). I see leaf's pretty regularly, but not during my commute, so I can't say the frequency as well.
Also, I see a lot of the Chevy plug in hybrids, and maybe some of their electric, but I don't know what it'd look like.
I'm not saying they're super common (they aren't), but they aren't even close to as rare around here as they are for you.
Most people where I live have a driveway, which I'm sure helps.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Dammit, that didn't make any sense.
I guess it's time to close up shop on my Betteridge's law of headlines auto-responder consultancy.
At least business is booming at my Poe's Law-firm.
I stole this Sig
My bet is on Equifax. Rather based on the history of how these things play out I'd be entirely shocked if it was still around come 2020.
Schools based on lectures and books, regardless of the age level, should be considered "dead man walking". Hands-on teaching (carpentry and surgery) will still require a hands-on approach for a couple of decades.
Public education takes up about half of state and local taxes. Think of all the money that would be freed up to do useful things if students were taught by computer programs. Teachers could do something productive for a change.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
assuming they don't move on to making other things, companies that make...
+ Keyboards
+ mice
+ laptops
+ graphing calculators
Nullius in verba
I hope more for Facebook to go away.
Microsoft has had its peak, but will probably not go away.
Oracle is at larger risk. it's big and bulky with an unclear business strategy.
Several cloud service providers are at risk.
Some ISPs with bad customer treatments.
Analog land lines are already dying in bulk.
Trumps real estate business is probably at risk.
Apple - past Jobs the vision is gone.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Investment advice is already done by computers, as is some type of legal advice - computerised appeals against parking tickets
Other forms will follow: medical advice, counselling (though it doesn't even take a smartphone to say "how does that make you feel")
Journalism. That is already dead in most publications. It just hasn't stopped moving yet.
TV repair and other home appliances. Already on their last elbows, soon to be totally extinct.
Train driver. Just as soon as they can unionise robots and teach them how to go on strike
TV / Film personalities. We have already seen a few avatars (Max Headroom, anyone?) But a digital "personality" is far easier to work with
National leaders : see TV personalities
Postal deliveries. Does this need explaining?
Road sweepers. The first public / road-travelling robots.
Airport baggage handlers.
Librarians. No more libraries
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The problem with the demise of newspapers (that people pay for) is not the newspaper, its the loss of journalism and the rise of fake news Nd anyone oublishing any unresearched crap they want.
Poeple will pay for something they can hold in their hands. This is going to be he end of us.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
For very Renaissance there will eventually be a renfair. Good luck making billions off that.
There are zounds of used bookstores where I live. I hope they never go extinct.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I'm not rich and I have an EV. In fact used ones are popular with people who can do the maths required to understand how cheap they are to own, like taxi/uber drivers. My old Leaf is an uber now.
It will be interesting when we get to the tipping point where it's actually a real pain to own an ICE vehicle in some places, due to lack of refuelling stations in the area.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't over-estimate how big those revivals are though. Vinyl only looks like it is selling in significant volume because no-one buys music on physical media any more. CD sales are way, way down in the last decade, as are music sales in general thanks to streaming.
I was surprised to see camera shops trying to make a comeback. There is a chain in the UK called Jessops, which had a pretty terrible reputation for being an over-priced hard-sell rip-off even back in the day. They all closed and a low grade celebrity businessman bought the name, and is trying to bring them back. But everything in there is still twice the price you can get it on online, and with online sales you have more consumer rights.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You are clueless.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Record stores have bounced back
No they haven't! I have in my collection 1000 (!) CDs which I bought over the years. I used to go into record stores a lot and continuously buy more of them. But *all* the record stores I frequented have closed. When I go to shopping malls all over the world, I no longer see record stores, and don't have any opportunity to buy new CDs. The last CD I bought was a year ago, when I visited some old shopping mall and was thrilled to see a CD store, and was so thrilled that I immediately bought 3. But apparently, I'm the only one. People don't even know what to do with physical CDs any more: you can't physically stick it into your music-play phone, and the music and movie industry succeeded too well in demonizing people who "rip" their CDs and DVDs to files.
photographic film has bounced back
Maybe in your alternate universe :-) Nobody I know used photographic film in more than a decade. Maybe some art fans are still using it, but that's 0.01% of the market share it used to have.
telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
That I agree.
Even of the ones they got right, they weren't very right. For example, crop dusters are increasingly being replaced by drones (which can fly lower safely), rather than by big companies using the same tech (as they predict). Newspapers, as you say, don't seem to have gone anywhere, though the online editions are more popular than ever. I'd disagree on used bookstores: any time I travel in the English-speaking world, I pop into a used bookstore to find something to read, and I've not noticed a decline here. There are still a lot of them about and given the recent statistics on the decline in popularity of eBooks, I don't think they're going away any time soon. If anything, telemarketing seems to be on the increase, with cheap VoIP systems making it easy to run a callcenter in India and robodial anyone in the world. Coin-operated arcades are still around. As you say, most of them had already closed 10 years ago, but I've not seen any close since then and I have seen newer ones open.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It doesn't help matters in the US when there is a specific law (the Tax Reform Act of 1986 section 1706) that made it difficult for independent contractors in IT working as an individual to continue to work as an independent contractor in many cases.
Sort of like Elvis and disco,. It has to fade away two generations later. The generation that lived it, and their kids trying to remember their childhood
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Electronics Repair as a career: It won't just be stopped by lack of parts and schematics; things just won't break as much. We already have some phones that can take a swim and be fine. The day screens become more durable and batteries don't have a shelf life, that's really most of the problem.
TV repair: (see above) It's really only the panels that break unless there's a power surge. Most remaining TV repair services will be working hand-in-hand with salvage services like what I did on the side for a few years until the screens just got too damn big to handle. Only bigger operations will be able to make it economical. And, with lighter weight and fewer nasty chemicals to deal with since the switch to LED lighting, it'll actually be okay.
Enthusiast-targeted boutique computer stores/hardware makers: With Moore's Law slowing down and Nintendo with the Switch and plenty of phone/tablet makers having proven it already, games are getting easier to run on smaller and smaller equipment. You'll still be able to "roll-your-own", but it will be easier to just tick a few boxes on an order to get that fire-breathing GPU (which will be based on a card built for Deep Learning and other intense math stuff, as today), just don't expect twenty different brands with ten different models each, let alone a flashy heatsink, since there won't be any way to see it: big computers will be unnecessary. SSDs are small and optical is all-but-dead. Big computers will go the way of the "more fans, the better" and the big CRTs of the dot-com era.
The local hotspots like clubs and bars: Or at least they'll need an overhaul. Dating already pretty much changed forever with the advent of Tinder and the more streamlined online dating services that could be accessed from a phone app. Going to a club or bar to meet random people, looking for that spark is pretty much history in ten years. I know there are already clubs and bars that are less about bumping music or doing shots and more about being able to just sit and chat in a relaxed atmosphere. There will get to be more of those since going to an expensive restaurant just to be away from the screaming toddlers and annoying waitstaff of Applebees et al just isn't a thing in most places.
Silicon Valley: After seeing so many tech companies show up and thrive in the last place I ever expected (Salt Lake City area), I knew there had to be plenty of such development elsewhere, too. Yep. If you're data-heavy, all you need is that fast pipe.
YouTube "stars": I'm not talking about bigclive, EEVBlog, AvE, AVGN, Louis Rossmann, Simon and Martina, GottLove, moviebob, or any other example who actually contributes usable content, I'm talking about the ones who thrive on the same flash in the pan trash tabloids, gossip shows, and such do: creating drama or shock. Like that numbnuts who destroys expensive shit just because his ad revenue more than makes up for it. Or that subset of douchebags who just try to create content from conflicts between other "stars" and sometimes try to drag actual content creators into their mess.
Anything marketed directly at fat people: If your target demographic isn't worth the advertising budget, you put those dollars elsewhere. And, like it or not, people are moving around a lot more. You don't have to be at home to get on the Internet. You don't have to sit at home and wait for TV. You can be doing things. And good food is going to become easier to get access to. We are going to slim down. It's already happening.
SAE measurements in construction: The US is going Metric. I believe in a decade we will see construction materials dual-labeled, at the very least, like Canada does with road signs. Once construction goes Metric, it's a go for the rest of the transition to be made.
MP3 as a format: It will be left in the dust completely, as data rates and storage volumes increase. Technology is getting better. Earphones and even bluetooth speakers (if they have that aptX technology) sound good enough that FLAC or another lossless audio compressio
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
My predictions for business that may well be dead in the not-to-distant-future (if they aren't already):
Video rental stores (I am surprised the ones that still exist have been able to hang on for so long given the rise of both rental kiosks and digital content purchase/rental/streaming/etc)
Landline phones (more and more people will replace home phones completly with mobile like I have or they will get some sort of VoIP service running over cable or fibre or whatever other tech rather than actual proper old-school copper wire phones)
Tobacconists (as less people smoke, taxes on tobacco increase and more and more general retailers like supermarkets and petrol stations are selling cigarettes, less and less people will have a reason to go to a specialty tobacconist for their tobacco products. Laws regulating how retailers can display and sell tobacco products dont help matters either)
Paid FTP software (with free alternatives like FileZilla being as good as the paid alternatives if not better, why would anyone bother to pay for FTP software anymore?)
Classified advertising in newspapers (why would anyone bother with newspapers when buying cars, buying property, looking for a job or buying general crap when things like Gumtree, realestate.com.au, Seek, CarSales and others in other countries are so much better)
Printed TV guides and listings (with digital TV even free-to-air channels give you up-to-date on-screen program guides so you can see what's on and when plus if you do need to look it up without looking on your TV, the Internet has you covered for that)
Printed phone books (I am surprised these aren't completly dead yet)
Toy stores (with the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us and consumers increasingly buying toys from online or from big box department stores that have lower prices than the toy retailers, could the death of the toy store be far away?)
The University of Missouri has had a 35% decline in enrollment since the riots a couple of years ago. It's so bad at Missouri that they're renting out dorm rooms to football fans.
Others may follow if they aren't careful. Riots are happening on college campuses more and more frequently.
Petrol stations only make sense when the fuel isn't widely available pretty much everywhere. As such you will only find dedicated rapid charging stations on fast roads where people do long distances, and maybe a handful in cities. Most charging will be done opportunistically when the car isn't in use.
That's what makes EVs so much more convenient. I spend much less time "refuelling" than I ever did with an ICE now, because it's extremely rare for me to stop just to charge.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The problem is that factual reporting is boring. Detailed investigations are expensive, and even if they do turn out to be interesting the moment you publish them every other newspaper reports the same thing the day after. So all you have left is clickbait, which can take several forms (outrage, bullshit, porn) but is always cheap and somewhat effective.
Some newspapers are turning to patronage and it does seem to be working for them, at least for now. A few are niche enough to get away with charging, like the FT. But really, I won't miss the shitty tabloids. The sooner they die the better.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
music and movie industry succeeded too well in demonizing people who "rip" their CDs and DVDs to files.
You're assuming most people know how to do that or want to waste time ripping discs when it's faster to just download a copy from the internet.
"Massive". I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Sure these things will be available and people will still buy them. The arguments you make is like saying "the car did not kill the horse industry. There are stil horses around and people use them in traffic.
Sure, it doubled perhaps from last year, but it is nowhere close as to what it was.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Most of these are reasonable, but you are way off on tobacconists. I can't imagine why you think more locations are going to start selling cigarettes, almost all gas stations/convenience stores/general retailers already do, and have for some time. What is starting to happen is stores that used to sell them are getting out of the business, Target was the first major retailer some time back, but more recently CVS stopped selling tobacco products. Others likely aren't far behind. If anything, in the future smokers will have to go to a tobacconist because there won't be other options.
Here in Australia it must be different then. All the major supermarket chains still sell cigarettes, as do many petrol stations and convenience stores. Some newsagents and other smaller businesses still sell cigarettes as well.
As for tobacconists in Oz, a lot of the ones I see are more shops selling all sorts of crap (e.g. sports/car racing merchandise, bar/alcohol related merchandise, heck I even saw one such store selling a Hookah Pipe in the shape of a Kalashnikov) that also happen to sell cigarettes on the side.
They probably survive more because of the other crap they sell than because of the money they make on cigarettes.
If anything, its likely to be the smaller businesses that exit tobacco retailing whilst the big chains like Coles and Woolworths remain in the business. Newsagents as well as any independent (or independently franchised) petrol stations and convenience stores that dont make enough money from tobacco sales to cover the increasing costs will be the first to stop selling I suspect.
I dont smoke and I am not involved in the business but I do notice what is happening and what sorts of businesses are still selling the products and what sorts are not...
Not 'just kidding'!
*** Don't be dull.***
Pundits and 24-hour news channels
I am so glad that the telemarketers disappeared and now I never get calls from strangers wanting to sell me stuff. /sarcasm
They didn't account for the Hipster market. What seems to be taking the biggest hit, are Malls and the Big Box stores.
The small stores with their local charm, have for the most part always had one foot in the grave. But for the most part they are still around, when they are in the right locations.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've been on it a long time... and I try not to keep up with 'breaking' news - the focus of now what is 'mainstream' media changes constantly, and it's exhausting.
I come here every day or every other day. It's kind of like not going to the theater to see new movies, and waiting for them to come out on DVD/Netflix. Sure, I'm never the first to hear about something, but when I do it's still relevant and interesting to me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Nothing ever completely dissapears. There are still people making a living in ways we consider obsolete. You can still buy a new buggy whip, suit of chain mail, vinyl record or roll of35mm film.It doesn't matter. Those things have gone and are functionally irellevant to 21st century life in the developed world.
There are some groups of people who want a buggy whip for its actual purpose. Some of them are avoiding the 20th or 21st centuries for cultural or religious reasons. Others might drive horse powered buggies for fun.
I watch someone on Youtube who is getting a suit of armour. It's an expensive hobby but it is being made by a serious professional.
Similar things could be said of the other items I listed but they are all gone as far away as they ever will./p>
What things will go the same way over the next 10 years?
1. Paper books will take a lot longer but there are less in the rich developed world but that is only a drop in a small part of the world.
2. Landline telephones do not exist in much of the world. I haven't had one for years but I know plenty of people who do. Businesses will stick with them for use in offices. Maybe in 25 years, they will be less common.
3. Pagers/bleeps are still more widely used than people think. Those of us who are tied to them would probably not mind if they all went the way of the dodo. The technology has been around for a long time. We just need management to realise it and for old systems to be replaced as they fail. 10 years? No problem.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
electric cars still have other limitations: short range and slow charge time.
The range is good enough for 99% of the time. For the other 1%, I can rent a gas car.
No, you cannot. Not if everyone has an electric. Everyone will want to rent a long-range car at the same time (vacations coincide) and I can guarantee that there is no rental company who is going to stock enough cars for peak supply (that happens bi-annually). They are going to carry only enough stock to make optimal profit.
Maybe you can Uber for that 1 out of 99 trips that use a significant range?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It depends on what you mean by "die". Lots of technologies have gone into niche markets, but if you want to buy a buggy whip today, you still can.
My predictions over a 10-15 year time span is that the following will die or become niche products:
- Hardcover books. Which already is mostly true - what's sold as a hardcover today is only very rarely a bound book, but a paperback that has been slapped a cardboard front and back on, and a fake cloth strip glued to the top and bottom of the spine to simulate it being bound.
- Book stores, also for new books. Religious book stores will live a while longer.
- DVDs.
- Electric guitars. Artists will still need them, but artists are becoming fewer, and youngsters testing the water aren't going for guitar these days.
- Suitcases. They are becoming cost-prohibitive for travel, where two bags with the same volume and weight costs less.
- Tablets. They are re-introduced as a new thing every 3-4 years, and flop every time. They're too big compared to a phone, and too cumbersome to use compared to a real PC. They'll die and something new with a new name will replace them.
- Secret votes for the public. Internet voting will kill that.
- Open votes for the legislature.
- Twitter and Facebook. If you think they are too big to fail, remember Yahoo, MySpace, LiveJournal...
- Large concerts, also known as "targets".
- http without an s.
- Handwriting being taught in school.
- In several countries except the US: coins
- TV game consoles. Games will be streamed and TVs will support dumb controllers.
- Cable TV. The cable TV companies will still control their oligopoly as internet providers and collect the danegeld, but you'll subscribe to streaming services.
- The SysRq, Scroll Lock and Break keys on keyboards. Useful, but not Pareto useful.
- Manual toll booths.
- Coke Zero Calories, to be replaced with Coke Zero
And I predict that Nehru jackets will make a comeback.
Video rental stores (I am surprised the ones that still exist have been able to hang on for so long given the rise of both rental kiosks and digital content purchase/rental/streaming/etc)
Kiosks don't have older titles, and $4 to rent a movie from Amazon is more expensive than (say) $1 per night from a brick-and-mortar store like Family Video. It's even worse if you live outside the service footprint of fiber, cable, or DSL, as you have to add on $5 to $10 per GB on top of that for the Internet data transfer quota overages that satellite and cellular ISPs charge. (Examples include rural areas and Seattle.)
Landline phones (more and more people will replace home phones completly with mobile like I have or they will get some sort of VoIP service running over cable or fibre or whatever other tech rather than actual proper old-school copper wire phones)
Unless they live in an area where the local fiber, cable, or DSL provider bundles a landline at no additional charge with Internet access.
Printed TV guides and listings (with digital TV even free-to-air channels give you up-to-date on-screen program guides so you can see what's on and when plus if you do need to look it up without looking on your TV, the Internet has you covered for that)
Unlike the on-screen guide in OTA or cable TV, a printed guide doesn't cover up the program that someone else in the household is watching.
with the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us and consumers increasingly buying toys from online
Online has no showroom, and though it's not quite as important for toys as for (say) clothes or laptop computers, it's still nice to get a feel for a toy's scale before buying it. (That's another reason I don't like blind boxes, apart from the duplicates.)
or from big box department stores that have lower prices than the toy retailers
Toys "R" Us has toys on shelves that Walmart and Target didn't have.
Crop dusters; Gay bars; Newspapers; Pay phones; Used bookstores; Piggy banks; Telemarketing; Coin-operated arcades.
At least one of each of these things exists within a 20 mile radius of me, so NBC scored 0%.
But some of these businesses went from being ubiquitous to being rare. Is that what's meant by "go away"?
(Hell, we even still have a Radio Shack and two video rental stores.)
I would add that thanks to VoIP technologies, telemarketers are not only alive and well but thriving.
Arcades and more specifically Barcades are popping up all over the place now.
Except as far as I can tell, barcades require age 21 to enter, and other arcades are dominated by redemption games (those that spit tickets) for small children. Where does this leave people who have outgrown the shallow, often random-number-driven gameplay of redemption games but haven't reached the senior year of college yet?
There is a used market? Are they down to the $3000 range yet?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The big music stores are all gone. Tower Records, kaput. HMV, exited the US market. Borders (a bookstore that had a big presence in music), gone. FYE, a shadow of its former self.
The record departments in the big box stores have also shrunk a lot. Walmart, Target, Best Buy... only a tiny bit of music left. Barnes & Noble (book store with music) has mostly withdrawn from music.
Small record stores and local chains (like Newbury Comics here in Massachusetts and neighboring states) have survived. Some have seen a surge in business with the hipster vinyl revival, which has also increased interest in used records. Urban Outfitters, the quintessential hipster chain, has ridden that revival and substantially increased its music sales, as well as selling record players.
One thing that NBC completely missed is the even more complete demise of video stores, though they were also already struggling in 2007. Streaming video took away most of the market. What market remains for physical video is now Redbox, the shrunken video sections in those big box stores, an occasional local chain that still sells video (Newbury Comics again), and online merchants. A few video rental places are soldiering on in small towns where high speed internet is uncommon, but they're just about extinct in cities.
They are sub £5000 in the UK so maybe $6000 US... But I don't know what the market is like over there.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I suspect that as more countries and US states legalize recreational marijuana consumption, tobacconists will branch out into that market. They'll sell fancy bongs alongside the high-end cigars. "Weed sommeliers" capable of telling you the different kinds of highs you can get from different weed cultivars will become a thing, if they're not already.
The list of businesses going down from ten years ago has an interesting anomaly; the camera film business.
There is actually a resurgence of film cameras among art students. My local camera shop is almost totally digital these days but reports a huge surge in sales of low end film cameras and B&W film. The reason is the art department at a local University having a hugely popular program called "Photography as Art" and the advanced course goes into detail on how darkroom technique creatively works with the subject matter.
For businesses going down the tubes in the next decade; I think "record labels" will be one of the first to go. For actually purchasing music; a label is totally irrelevant. The RIAA is only relevant for dunning streaming services for royalties. If someone organizes an association of music producers; the RIAA will be defunct totally as a union of creative talents can replace an association of industrial record pressers and greedy copyright holders. "Burn to Order" will probably be common for physical recording media soon as the norm is digital. Streaming is the new radio. But those with more eclectic tastes will still want to own copies of what they like.
Oddly, as record labels die, there is a resurgence of vinyl record companies doing audiophile pressings. I wonder if there will be a resurgence of glass recording makers as those were considered the audiophile versions back when vinyl was the mundane norm?
Die shoe stores, Die!
At least I hope they will but, alas, there are enough with a shoe shopping fetish to keep some open. Yet, if you are not of average size feet, you know the hate you have for all those stores with hundreds of style of shoe but all in average width. If you have wide or narrow feet, you are out of luck.
If someone makes a way to print a template then photograph your feet on it as a way to make custom shoes by computer controlled manufacturing; they would automatically rule the 40 percent of feet that don't fit average sizing.
NRRPT/RCT
Slashdot.org
These will be gone by 2027.
Cable TV
Landlines
Bitcoin
As long as suckers still pay a quarter mil to get that piece of paper at the end of it all, most universities wouldn't care.
They won't replace gas completely until a minimum wage worker earning $400 a week can afford them. About 300 British Pounds.
I'm going out looking though- $6000 is what I paid for my 11 year old Prius
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Not in my state, and we are glad to take the offloaded business we get from not being Missouri.
Someone had to do it.
I think outdoor recreational stores will see a decline in the next 10 years. Stores like Dicks sporting goods, Cabelas, and REI (to name a few US examples) already struggle to compete with online retailers, often due to higher markups in brick and mortar establishments for the same or similar equipment. Combine that with an industry that is on the decline (objective opinion based on what I've seen in recent years) and sales will continue to drop. Don't get me wrong, equipment for more "traditional" sports like football and baseball will still be around but for things such as camping/backpacking, canoeing, and mountain biking? I'm not so sure. Additionally, I think there will be a overall decline in publicly accessible land for these kinds of activates. I hope I'm wrong though, whatever happened to spending time outside?
Unfortunately, the spammers will have their own AIs as well.
The conflict will just get nastier and nastier.
They're currently "in" with the hipsters, that's all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Record stores have bounced back
When I go to shopping malls all over the world, I no longer see record stores, and don't have any opportunity to buy new CDs. The last CD I bought was a year ago, when I visited some old shopping mall and was thrilled to see a CD store, and was so thrilled that I immediately bought 3.
I did a Google Maps search and found a record store near me. They carried mostly T-shirts and other novelties. Of the three racks of CDs they had, two had movies on DVD. They did have one bin of vinyl, all recent re-issues of odd stuff (e.g., Green Day next to Frank Sinatra next to Fleetwood Mac). Would have been very disappointed if one of the shelves of DVDs wasn't all obscure Japanese-import anime.
Just junk food for thought...
But what about for whatever they want?
It's a university. Doing whatever you want in the restroom has been the standard since at least the 50s here in the US. Personally, I've:
With today's phones, you could also watch movies or attend lectures or even write and submit a paper. No end of stuff you can do in a bathroom.
Just junk food for thought...
Used bookstores: accurate; In this fetid dump of about a million souls, we haven't lost any used bookstores AFAIK. That's somewhat surprising, given that the average IQ is approximated by the individual's shoe size.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Two anecdotes near me:
1. A traditional family owned gas station. Pushed into bankruptcy when the owner died and turned out it was his name, personally, on the gas contract with Shell. Shell took over the station. I don't think the prevalence of priuses in the neighborhood had anything to do with it.
2. A locally owned Chevron franchise near me recently remodeled. They added a pump for biodiesel, the roof over the pumps got covered in Solar Panels, and they added 3 parking spaces with chargers fed from the solar panels for electric, plus they are a popular mini-mart. They're doing quite well actually at the conversion- and will be selling gas and biodiesel long after everybody else is gone.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Minimum wage workers take the bus, they don't own a car, at least not in Canada. You might be able to buy a car for $600 but the $1500/year in insurance is harder to cover.
there will still be some left of everything, nothing ever really goes away.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.