Two things:
First: I was running paid traffic to one of my niche game web sites hoping to make some affiliate commission by targeting a video game (Rockband Beatles) that I thought would be popular this Christmas. I a nice domain name, I signed up to affiliate that would drop-ship the product, and the Google adwords campaign was set and ready to go. The price seemed pretty good, about $150 with shipping included. Ran it for a week and then Amazon went Black Thursday about a week earlier and dropped their prices to $99. Oh gees, thanks. Dropped the campaign.
Second:
I had a nice phone chat with some people in the printing business about the availability of the Prinergy developers that got laid off this weekend. Smart people trying to make good solid moves in the printing business. Said they need developers, lots of them so they could re-engineer their production costs an order of magnitude lower. Needed good smart developers to tweak the algorithms, you know. The goal, the holy grail of course was to printing nothing more (and nothing less) than a production line. No craftsmen, no unskilled labour, heck no skilled labour, no humans getting involved at all to muck things up. It's been more than 10 years since thermal CTP and digital workflow took flight in this industry, and still innovators are stepping up and saying, hey, we can still do more, and faster.
It happens every years and nobody marvels anymore. Computers get cheaper, cell phones get cheaper, HDTVs get waaaay cheaper. Take a walk in the real world and everybody worries about government running deficits and the growth of the money supply and inflation. Leave the "real" world and enter tech world where inflation only refers to the ever-increasing sizes of LCD screen and companies have to figure out to keep their margins up with price drops of 10-30% a year, year-over-year.
Where is prepress going? It's getting dragged kicking and screaming into tech world. What are the implications of that? What do you think?
Need Supplies? Check out Brother FP4CL Fuser
