Industry Lifecycle

Industries come and go. Mostly. But especially in tech.

Like...there was an entire gargantuan dial-up modem industry in 1992. Its use was promulgated by legendary-good and legendary-bad, AOL or America Online, pioneer of consumer interactive computing. The lifecycle of the dial-up modem was fast: It came in the last 80s as a commercial thing (it had been around since the '50s in a laboratory). And then it died...pretty recently, relatively speaking. There still exist a few million dial-up modems, but virtually no profits come from the industry.

At the other end of the spectrum live addictive substances like caffeine and nicotine. Hello, Coke. Hi there, Phillip Morris. Those lifecycles are still thriving, even though they went "mass commercial" well over 100 years ago.