Product Life Cycle
Categories: Company Management
No, nothing to do with the elliptical home-gym-trainer.
Products are conceived. (Sometimes even in the back of a parked car.) They’re born. They grow. They dominate. They fade. They die. It happens again and again. That’s why they call it a cycle. Like the wheel of a bike that goes round and round, round and round, round and round.
Someone had the great idea to build AOL. It started out as a means for businesses to share electronic files, using Timeshare systems as sort of a first derivative of the Arpanet/original precepts of the internet. That idea was born in Reston, VA in the ‘80s, and just kinda plunked along for a few years until the commercial internet came along. AOL then offered anonymity, ease of use, and clever applications like chat, and its product offering...took off.
Millions adopted, paying 3 bucks an hour to be online, wired. AOL became a dominant way to ride the internet wave...only to fail to adopt, fail to innovate, whither as it folded itself into Time Warner, when it eventually began to die and produce mountains of cash as it milked its remaining years for dough. It sits today as a kind of museum relic inside of the doors of Verizon, who bought the company for scrap value as the rest of the world watched it fade into death.com.
So what’s next? Gas-powered cars? Do they fade into electric-powered clean oblivion? Wha about public school teachers in a world of unlimited online choice and A.I.-driven learning tools? What about pilots or bus drivers or taxi drivers in a world where driverless cars simply do it better than humans? All part of the product lifecycle system.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is a Business Cycle?3 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is a business cycle Well here's
a guy giving his cycle the business Yeah the bike
moves forward in time but this little white mark on
the tire while it keeps returning to the same place
again and again and again So yeah that's the foundation
of the notion of business as a cycle time continues
but you know business gets hot then cold then hot
then cold and yeah you get the idea Well why
is this the case Well lots factors They mostly revolve
around the wild pagan dance of greed and fear And
they get exacerbated when governments actively monkey around with the
cost of renting money otherwise known as the raising and
lowering of interest rates And if you're new to this
whole space if you lower interest rates and make money
cheap to borrow you heat up the economy or at
least you encourage it to get hot And if you
raise the cost of borrowing money well then you're going
to try to cool it off And the reason he
might want to do that is if inflation is roaring
right All right well in the us the business cycle
Runs roughly every eight years for what is called the
short cycle of business cycles for reasons only partly known
to humankind the money cycle revolves around the presidential election
cycle when historically every couple of terms the population gets
sick of one process of messing up government and they
choose to elect a new way to mess up government
So that's The short cycle happens every seven or eight
years and you see it in the stock market with
generally meaningful corrections Along that pattern there's also ate a
long business cycle that sees major shift about every quarter
century World wars affected numbers Technology innovation affects the numbers
and other exogenous factors like pollution and labor replacement by
robots Yeah yeah it's coming and healthcare or disease changes
and or big innovations that completely repaint the pavement such
that the tire slipped and turn and twist trying to
keep the bicycle upright The key goal Look outfor bollards