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.

Comments

Slashdot

[Tablizer]

just kidding, lighten up

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? The quality of the community and articles is not what it was. It keeps getting passed around from company to company. It is just one corp org away form shutting down. What is left is a very loyal community. But not one that probably earns whoever owns it right now much money.

Re:Slashdot

[walterhpdx]

They might make more money if they allowed subscriptions (they have been disabled for months as far as I can tell). Reddit had a great little thing going called "Reddit Gold" that you could buy that would give you...something, I don't remember what. I was always buying Reddit Gold for people who were being awesome when most people were being dicks. I'd happily support Slashdot.

Re: Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Paradoxically, the quality of the comments here would be better if the posting limits were removed. It's stupid that you can only post twice before having to wait long periods of time before being able to comment again. It makes good discussion impossible. Plus it drives away good commenters. The end result is the low quality discussion we now see here so often.

Re:Slashdot

[RhettLivingston]

Sadly, when was the last time the "slashdot effect" was actually observed to cause a virtual DOS attack due to a link from slashdot as opposed to some other site?

Re:Slashdot

[Megane]

They can't even get the comment thresholds to work anymore. They've been broken for months, I can't save any changes I make to them and have to drag the sliders every time I open a new article.

Re: Slashdot

[Megane]

Or you could, you know, create an account and log in? The posting thresholds are effectively gone when you post with a username. Only when I use the "Post Anonymously" checkbox do I have to deal with the posting limits.

Re:Slashdot

[Megane]

They changed their name to srad.jp, but seem to have about the same low number of posts as I remember from years past. If you want to call that dead, then it was never alive.

Re:Slashdot

[rtb61]

Slashdot much like your own body continually dies. You know your are dying as we post, countless dead cells haunting your carcass to be replaced by new cells, you have continually died and reborn since you were first conceived. So as for slashdot, people will move on, newcomers will join, some will hung around till the day they die. The open exchange of ideas around the geek/nerd news of that day. Tearing it apart, putting it back together in new ways just because and injecting new ideas back into the human gestalt in affect programming the AI that is the internet. Slashdot certainly continually changes over time.

Re: Slashdot

[angel'o'sphere]

Logged in you can only post once per minute, and if you are above a certain amount per day, every 5 minutes.
And there is a maximum of posts per day, 25 or 50, don't remember.

Re:Slashdot

[admin7087]

I'd say the exact opposite is true. The majority of reasonable people interested in tech news stopped posting or left years ago - e.g. to various subreddits and hacker news, or no forum at all to save time - and the many newcomers from the past five years or so are messing up moderation and the submitters have turned Slashdot in some kind of political opinion and household gadget slashvertisement site. And a large army of AC trolls appeared. I used to come here to learn about things like kernel development, satellite communication, or grey hat hacking, and noways people on /. seriously discuss whether "Alexa" is an operating system.

What you are experiencing seems to be due to changes to the mod point algorithm after the last ownership change. I believe it was designed to keep the trolls at bay and it works to some extent.

(Disclaimer: I've lurked on Slashdot since its beginnings and posted very actively about ten years ago, under various accounts and user names that are long gone.)

Re: Slashdot

[AmiMoJo]

It depends on your karma. If you have excellent karma I don't think there is any limit on maximum posts per day at all.

Immigration Lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, once immigration is ended once and for all, who needs a lawyer?

Re:Immigration Lawyer

[bruce_the_moose]

All the people trying to get the fuck out

Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[ArmoredDragon]

I doubt it. Remember that Google Chrome literately stole Safari and rebranded it Chrome

Were you born retarded, or were you just kicked in the head by a horse later in life?

The only thing Chrome shares in common with Safari is that older versions of Chrome used the same rendering engine as Safari called Webkit. Webkit itself was a fork of KHTML (of the Konquerer web browser,) which was written by KDE. Google, at one time, made the majority of the contributions to Webkit to support a lot more HTML5/CSS features. Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing, deprecate vendor tags, and use a multi-process model. This fork became the Blink rendering engine that other browsers besides Chrome use, such as Opera and Vivaldi.

Ever since Google stopped contributing to Webkit, Apple has been developing it at a snail's pace, just like IE6 back in the day, making Safari the lowest common denominator, which is pissing off a lot of developers. Perhaps because Apple wants users on their app store (read: $$$) rather than on the web? Pretty much the same motivation Microsoft had (Microsoft literally circulated an internal memo describing the web as a threat to its cash cow, Windows.)

Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[Anubis IV]

You got most of that right, but one important correction: Chrome had a multiprocess model years before they ever forked Blink from WebKit, and WebKit already had a multiprocess model by the time Blink was forked.

Backing up a bit, years and years prior to the split, Google baked a multiprocess model into Chromium, rather than WebKit. This gave Chrome a major competitive advantage over Safari and other browsers that relied on WebKit. Apple, of course, wanted to have a multiprocess model as well, so they later baked it directly into WebKit, but it was a significant enough departure that they forked it as WebKit 2. As you’d expect, Google didn’t contribute much (anything?) towards WebKit 2 since it wasn’t compatible with their existing multiprocess model, and, as you’d expect, Apple’s contributions towards WebKit dried up as they focused on WebKit 2. Making things even more interesting, WebKit 2 was a buggy mess for quite awhile, so Apple itself didn’t even adopt it in Safari for Mac or iOS immediately, and Google would have had even less reason to adopt it.

Google’s eventual forking of Blink from WebKit was really the natural conclusion to the choice Apple had made years earlier when they forked WebKit 2, which was itself the natural next step after Google decided to keep its multiprocess model to itself, which was itself the natural next step after Apple left such a glaring hole in WebKit’s architecture, and so on and so in.

Re: Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[angel'o'sphere]

Of course.

Or how would you deal with several email addresses?

Opening each of them in a browser window, each of them with a different GUI?

Oh, shudder ...

And yes, I even use POP, as I want all my mails and mailboxes on my local machine and not somewhere on a server.

How would I search for some mail stuff in an air plane if my mails would be on a server?

Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[TheRaven64]

Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing

Except that Google supported sandboxing in a crappy way. Apple implemented sandboxing in WebKit, so every application that uses WebKit gets the benefit. For example, when you view an HTML email in Apple Mail, it's rendered in a separate process that has no network or filesystem access, and the changes to enable this amount to about 4 lines of code (basically, opt into this behaviour and promise that you won't use any of the deprecated APIs that it breaks). In contrast, Chrome puts the sandboxing in the browser, so anyone using Blink has to implement their own sandboxing layer.

Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google.

[AmiMoJo]

Google's way is actually the same as Apple's way, it's just not immediately obvious.

Apple wanted multiprocess in WebKit because they WebKit as part of their OS and in other apps. Google wanted multiprocess in Chrome because Chrome /is/ their OS.

On Google's OS the apps are just web pages. They even have apps for Chrome that are just .zip files with all the web site resources pre-downloaded for faster opening, plus a few extra local storage features.

Re:gas stations

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

buggy whips are in an uptick (10 things)

[WillAffleckUW]

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).

Re:buggy whips are in an uptick (10 things)

[SharpFang]

I seriously doubt your assertion about cell phone stores.

First, the current trend is "more powerful CPU, more fancy screen, more feature-packed, and try to squeeze in a better battery that can run that for a couple hours." This trend doesn't seem to be changing, and so self-powered phones won't happen anytime soon as anything but a gimmick. There's simply no way to keep all these features running off "ambient" power.

And Wifi range is short enough there's no way you'd see these 'self-charging' phones running a mile away from the city.

The shops may lose some impact as Internet sales and delivery to your door take over, but it's still a long way until they vanish, and certainly not because phones get replaced by "smart jewelry".

Here's a few

[mattb47]

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.

Re:Here's a few

[swb]

I think electric cars will become another example of how well-off people are able to leverage technology to maintain an economic advantage.

For the foreseeable future, there is no good way to own an electric car and be a renter without parking spot with a charger. Public charging will take too long and the cars won't have enough reserve to not make it a continual bother. So all of the economic benefits of owning an electric car will go to people who can afford the parking/charging setup.

If governments start eliminating IC cars, you now basically strip the practical ability of renters and high-density area apartment dwellers of the ability to even *own* a car. This isn't a problem in the 20% of urban areas with dense housing and employment and transit, but in many others it becomes a major economic disadvantage. You may not like cars generally, but the reality is they enable a huge amount of employment flexibility and improved time efficiency for other activities.

I'm all in favor of electric cars, but I think in subtle ways they become advantages for well off people and become unobtainable for lower income people who can now manage them. If the technology changes -- charging in the time of a gas fill, week-long charge cycles, maybe it will be a more universal benefit.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Lobbyists

[Pseudonym]

Just kidding. Lobbying will be a growth industry for the next decade at least.

Re:Lobbyists

[Tablizer]

Naw, they'll be automated:

while(conglomerate.satisfied==false) {
  politician.bribe.percent++;
}

not much about business but ocuppations

[Pirulo]

Drivers, burger flippers, mechanics,

Uber!

[manu0601]

What company will disapear? Uber! You cannot loose money on every trip forever.

Re: Uber!

[gravewax]

Once self driving cars are realised Uber won't really be relevant anymore as any company will be easily able to setup self driving services locally. Uber's current strength is its driver base, without that they are no better than any startup.

Youtubers

[gosand]

Please, for the love of the gods, please let this stop being a profession.

Re:Youtubers

[gosand]

I grew up with arcades, so I can appreciate video games. When my kids watch other people play video games, I don't get it either. It's not so much the video gaming part... but the inane, constant, talking. They don't shut up for 2 seconds. Although, I think that may be a reflection of our society, where people feel compelled to spout their opinion the second something comes into their mind, and send it out to the world, all day, every day.

As I heard someone once say though, how is watching someone play video games different than watching televised sports? It's a very good point... although I don't understand or do that either.

TV NETWORKS

[Registered Coward v2]

Goodbye NBC, we hardly watched you...

Coal miners.

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Hookers

[jwhyche]

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.

Re:Oracle

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[darkain]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[Megane]

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.

Re:gas stations

[petermgreen]

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.

Re: gas stations

[AvitarX]

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.

Re:Easy one

[lord_mike]

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

No.

[quantaman]

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.

Re:Google

[Z00L00K]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[tigersha]

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.

Re:Easy one

[The Snowman]

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

This is a legitimate concern (for the NFL). Fewer children playing will dry up the talent pool in another decade when those children would be at the age for the NCAA and (eventually) NFL. Sure, plenty of children will play, but consider how few of them have the necessary talent to succeed in the NCAA, and how few of those have the talent for the NFL. I did the math once and it is a small fraction of one percent of high school football players actually make it to the NFL, and most of them suck at the sport anyway. At any given time there are only enough good players to make three or four teams in the NFL.

The NFL itself is also really unpopular, with Roger Goodell pissing off the NFL's fans at least once every season and getting booed any time he shows up on TV in front of a live audience (e.g. Super Bowl, NFL draft). I think the only reasons the NFL is still popular are: fantasy football is still a huge thing, even drawing people in that hate the sport (I know people who hate the game but still play fantasy); and some vestigial attachment to one's home team, essentially pride in one's city to include its sports teams.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

I keep hearing these arguments, but have not seen any evidence to back them up. Ratings fluctuate, and are on a general down trend, but nothing massive - it is not like the sport is unpopular, it is just not quite as popular as it was previously. It does seem, however, that ratings have followed the general trend of everything receiving lower ratings.

This makes sense, as sports in general (in the USA) seem to have declining ratings. Cord cutting? Younger generation caring less? Who knows? It is a complex issue and there is likely not one cause, e.g. "the NFL is killing itself with how it changes the game."

Re:gas stations

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[urdak]

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.

My predictions for business that will be dead soon

[jonwil]

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?)

Re:Easy one

[coofercat]

"...made the game less interesting to watch"? Wow - I didn't know that was possible ;-)

More seriously though, if the NFL can fix up some of the more tedious aspects of the game, make a game last the 25 minutes of actual play, versus the 5 hours of ads + inane commentary, then it might have an exportable product. They'd have to rebrand to be the IFL, and they'd need to change the F to be something else, because most of the rest of the world thinks football is a game where you're only allowed to touch the ball with your feet. But if they can do all that, then the rest of us might be a market to grow into.

baseball on the other hand... I can't see that catching on anywhere. It's cricket without the good bits, and cricket's got the market sown up for "sit around drinking while some people play a technical, but not terribly energetic sport".

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate

[Hognoxious]

Record stores have bounced back, photographic film has bounced back

They're currently "in" with the hipsters, that's all.

Re:Microsoft

[NikeHerc]

Microsoft. Like IBM has nearly disappeared after decades pioneering... Microsoft has very little left. It never had much, and noticeably less if you throw out all the useless, senseless crap. If there remains any good karma in the universe, microsoft will die.