Clearly newspapers are the poster child for this topic. ABCnews.com approaches this topic with research that forecasts industry changes over the next 5 years. Some of their predictions and suggestions:
Another way to avoid disaster? Diversify. In response to decades of declining circulation and shaky print advertising numbers, newspaper publishers are expanding their holdings in non-traditional ways. The two largest, Gannett and Tribune, own a stake Careerbuilder.com, the online job search Web site. In 2005, The New York Times Co. bought About.com, a general information site. Will it work? The jury is out. Worth noting, though–the industry’s most successful transition is also its most radical. The Washington Post Co. secured their future by buying Kaplan Learning centers, morphing the company into an “information” firm and leaning on the new entity, rather than their news operations, to drive growth.
The Washington Post has done a good job of adapting ahead of the trend. However, I wonder if it is simply too late for these other papers to make such a shift in their business model (I think it is).
Here is one I didn’t think about, but it is a certain trend based on Gen Y:
The most surprising find: While technology is changing the face of many industries, the firms within them are often doing quite well. One strategy for surviving a technological onslaught is to control the change itself. AT&T and Verizon, the largest wired telecommunications firms, are hardly worried that more than 1 million phone “land lines” are expected to be switched off each year between now and 2012. Both of those firms saw their wireless subscriber numbers surge in 2007.
True. I suspect home phone lines will disappear in the very near future as cell phones eventually become the standard. The article is a good read if you have the time.