Trends are a massively destructive force. They’ve taken us from horrifically expensive computers stored in buildings to wasting compute cycles to animate the album covers on my iPhone. Disk drives the size of fridges with enough storage for 2 mp3s to the Terabyte disk I just bought off Amazon. Charles Lindbergh > being famous for crossing the Atlantic to weekends in New York to take advantage of the shopping (fair enough, the exchange rate has put paid to that but you get the idea).
All of these are possible because something scarce and valuable became common and cheap. It just took time. They destroyed one set of value (IBM making 1000% on those hard drives) and transferred it to everyone (my iPhone – the hard disk manufacturer has created a work of genius that they’re making 2% and will be obsolete in 6 months) There’s an obvious and interesting question about which things with value due to their scarcity and consumer pull will evolve in the same way.
We’ve seen the revolution in telecommunications and what it’s done to the carriers. We’re watching the newspaper people realise their day in the sun is done. What we’re not seeing is anything happen to the power companies (in fact energy seems likely to become more scarce and expensive bucking this trend entirely). Cars similarly have reached the point where they don’t seem to be getting better as vehicles, they just come with nicer toys inside. I love my Audi convertible but the latest Ford Focus is a fantastically good car and the mismatch in value vs. price is going to become more stark as we go forward.
Consumer electronics? All those companies that used to be nicely segmented all look the same today – Sony directly competes with Korean companies you’d never heard of 10 years ago on quality and price and neither of them seems to have any margin left to play with. I get a 42″ LCD screen for pocket change and the old electronics giants slowly fade.

Instapaper is totally blowing my mind. Finally something to replace my insane scheme of keeping 20-50 tabs open in Safari to make sure I catch up with web content that looks interesting. I’ve been using the free version for about 2 weeks and I’m just now downloading the Pro edition. This should be on your iPhone!