It is a dated idea to have someone deliver you news in paper form every morning. Online newsrooms have infinite space, archived content can be monetized forever.Print newspapers are cumbersome, have irrelevant ads.Digital news can be easily shared, linked to and archived.Print news dies quickly, isn’t even really “news” anymore by the time it prints in a digital age.Countless times I’ve seen a story on blogs, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon or even the newspaper’s own website – then chuckled to see it in print the next day.īesides, as I wrote in a post on web clips – worth far more than print clips: It is wasteful both for print and delivery and also not a timely way to receieve news. There is no possible reason to receieve news in a printed format. Apparently a group of people didn’t get the memo we have this wonderful, efficient way of receiving content via cleanly organized text and high resolution images on attractive high quality displays. Why they are done for: Again, we live in a digital world. Possible uses until they go off life-support: doorstop, interlinking the pages for science experiments ala mythbusters, test material for your new tree shredder.
was too little, too late (and too useless). This is a clear example of what happens when a business flat out ignore shifts in technology. In reality, the yellow pages should have become Google. How they could have survived: The print version was done for no matter what. So many directory services are vying for the ad dollars of local businesses that no single site has an authoritative roster.” The audience for online yellow pages remains relatively small, and traffic growth is slowing. Now, the economic downturn is sending the already ailing business into a tailspin.
In recent years, as its customers migrated to the Web - flocking to sites like Google - the telephone-directory business followed, hoping the Internet would be its salvation.īut that strategy hasn’t panned out. “The yellow-pages industry is running out of lifelines. Good news though from the WSJ – they won’t last too much longer: What can you do to help speed their demise: Absolutely refuse delivery when someone brings you them. Altogether an exercise in futility – the sooner these die off, the better. The fact that they are shipped with a CD is laughable and goes to show you how clueless the people behind them really are. It is a waste of energy for these to be printed and delivered, it is annoying to receieve them when you don’t even want them – and once you get them they sit in a cabinet, never to be opened. It has bothered me since the advent of search engines that these wasteful, disorganized monstrosities of the last century have continued to exist. Why they are done for: The printed Yellow Pages have absolutely zero function in a digital society. Previous examples (as seen in the image above) include cassette tapes, the floppy disk, VHS and camera film. Just for fun, I thought I would take a lighthearted approach to listing a few technologies/services which have served a function but have been made obsolete ages ago by a changing world. Yet industries seek to hold onto the past tightly, even when their time has come and gone, at a cost to society – time, money, frustration and future progress. “Analog Retirement” (credit: busted tees)Īs technology moves forward and business and society change consumption patterns, certain mediums and aging solutions become obsolete.
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