I agree that all companies will end up with a media component. However, I think you will see more and more out sourcing. For example, company A will still concentrate on their core business of producing widget/service A but will hire a media company to do their media interface. If they haven't already outsourced their technical support then any in house tech support will be routed through the media company.
The down side to this is the media companies will gain tremendous power over their client companies.
So may be in the end you are right only media companies will be left. They will have product and service subsidiaries or even portfolios of products and services but the main controlling company will have media as it's core business.
I still think outsourcing will be the intermediate step. I don't think this will be good for consumers or society at large however. You will have huge mega media companies with monopolistic locks on local, regional and may be even national markets.
You can see some of this today. Most public companies are all the same. They are in business to make money for their shareholders. That is the job of every single public company. One of the senior executives at Odwalla made a statement that when Odwalla was a smaller company they focused on making the best juice they could so they could make money for the company. When Coca-Cola bought them their focus changed to just making money.
What we have lost as capitalists is the promise of better products at competitive prices. Media companies are partly to blame for this. They have convinced whole generations of consumers that they can't live with out "product A" so people buy product A at highly inflated prices. Also the amount of competition out there is very small.
Look at e-book pricing. The inflated cost of an e-book is directly due to increases in media investment. The truth is a paper hardcover book is almost trivial to bring to a retailer's store shelf. The big costs are in marketing, advertising, and publishing. That's why you will pay almost hardcover prices for e-books. The huge price tag on a book has not been a product of the actual physical product in decades, so it's elimination doesn't have a huge effect on it's price when the medium is switch to non-physical. I worked for a printer and a book that was in a condition to be directly sold (finished product) cost about 6.00 dollars. This included the cost to make the book, store the book and ship the book. This did not include publisher fees, marketing costs, writer fees, artist fees, or retailer markups. But the physical product from start to retailer's shelf only cost 6.00 USD. So a 25.00 USD book had a lot of costs that had nothing really to do with the physical product.So it follows that an e-book should be about 19.00 USD as the majority of the price is not due to physical manufacture but abstract services.
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