The Internet and networking are essential to the future. The Internet is taking down telephone wires, TV cable, post offices, printing presses, and much brick-and-mortar retail. FedEx should continue to do well. Applications that embrace the Internet and interconnectivity will flourish as will the infrastructure of networking.
As wireless networking standards establish themselves in very low-power embedded applications, a new level of connected products will create new markets and expand existing ones. This culmination of many advances in electronics integration is nearly upon us and should open applications from wireless sensor networks to truly connected homes.
The converged smart phone and everything similar to it will continue to be a hotbed of activity as the right combination of features, displays, input methods, size, and cost will coalesce into more narrowly-targeted products. Hardware and software integration, resource access and content, use models and business models, portability, and even style and industrial design will each play roles in success. Android, Google, and names from the East not previously associated with electronic products may take center stage with these.
Kindle is an interesting example. I panned e-books ten years ago as solving no real problem and not even lowering the cost of buying a book. While those criticisms remain, the intervening years have seen the nature and use of Amazon and the Internet evolve. Who has time to read books anyway? I can barely make it through email subject lines and 140 character tweets (twitter: TxTom).
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The best thing to get the economy going is for people to spend their money. Prices aren’t going to get any better. If you have a job and want a boat, a big-screen TV, upgraded multimedia service, or just a couple of new outfits, then to go out and buy them. It’ll be cheap. If you have the money and have been thinking of adding a media room to the house, the bids for the remodeling will be lower than in recent years and the equipment will be a bargain. Most importantly, those purchases play the market fairly. They mainly reward the products and services consumers value, and that encourages further development in the right areas. Government incentive programs twist the market, encouraging sales in unnatural markets, and only delay inevitable doom.
What should motivate people to buy is the realization that prices right now are being held unnaturally low by the sellers. Companies have spent the last year cutting costs to the bone and are willing to sell at the greatest discount in years just to keep revenue flowing. Inventories are low and middlemen have been trimmed. The end result of a lean food chain is value: a lot of product for just a little money. In another year when the economy has recovered, margins up and down the food chain will expand and prices will rise.
The economy is probably not getting any worse, but jobs are not improving either. The first quarter is likely to be bad following the normal year-end situation. It would be nice to have a couple of promising new electronic product categories, but they’re not obvious. By spring it should be easier to see just how strong the new decade will start, but it is most likely to be 2011 before everyone can forget the recession of 2009.