pencil industry to disappear now pens invented

Far be it from me to rain on anyone else's Detroit bashing high, But Thomas Friedman's latest ode to the big 3's short sightedness contains the following silliness:

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

I guess I'm pretty behind the times, but our house still gets quite a lot of mail-order catalogues, the world still seems pretty well populated with HMV's, and Barnes and Nobles hasn't exactly gone under either.

All of the industries he's mentioning are facing some new challenges, true... in fact, there are even better examples he could have picked, such as print newspapers vs. the internet... but even there, people used to predict that paper books would fall completely by the wayside once personal computers spread - remember the "paperless office"...

All in all this is a pretty horrendous case of pundit fallacy #642773: "Any sexier form of technology will inevitably entirely displace the older, less sexy form from the market."