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Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

Firms in Silicon Valley focus on eliminating whole industries; when they succeed at that, they capture basically all the value that the incumbents in that industry had.

I'm genuinely curious:

What whole industries have been eliminated? Also what value do you refer to? Are you saying that all profit that used to go to industry X now goes to a silicon valley company?

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"Commoditized" is probably a better word than "eliminated", but the point is that a large percentage of people who used to do something one way now do it another. For example:

Independent bookstores. Catalog retailers. Much of general retail. Antique & collectible shops. Classified ads. Yellow pages. Newspapers & magazines. Books. The music cartel. Travel agents. Realtors and education are probably next.

And yes, all (or most) of the profit that used to go to those industries now goes to Amazon/EBay/Craigslist/Google/Apple/Kayak etc.

craigslist and newspapers

amazon and local booksellers or borders

netflix and blockbuster

google and {altavista, yahoo (on their way), excite, ask, infoseek, inktomi}

oracle and a long list of competitors

Palm and paper planners Apple and low to mid level print shops Apple and CDs Netflix and DVD/Bluray (in progress...) Amazon Kindle and paper books

This would be a fun list to really spend some time on

You can find a nice table of disruptive tech in the new intro to the revised edition of Innovator's Dilemma.

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