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Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption?
After seeing the ticketmaster/livenation merger post, there's probably a long list of industries ripe for disruption. ie- ticketing, riaa/music,etc. I'd love to start putting together a list of other industries, so hence the reason for this post.
Please post reasons and/or a piece of information that provides insight as to why that industry is ripe for disruption
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoMusic Industry This may be one of the most obvious ones out there. Artists don't need the record labels anymore. The money is not purely in the music, but ticket sales, merchandise, extra content,etc. I like what topspin media is doing. Myspace has made great strides, but it's just a start.
- mikecuesta 18y agoiTunes much?
- josefresco 18y agoHis comment would have made more sense if he said "iTunes' instead of the Music Industry.
- noodle 18y agoonline auctions. ebay sucks, for both the buyers and sellers. and ebay doesn't even like auctions anymore, they're moving towards the amazon-style marketplace model.
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoGood one. Ebay is just such a force to be reckoned with, but they've completely lost their soul. They've pissed their sellers off like none other. You would have to have something so different and innovative to start stealing their thunder. Maybe you start in a different niche ie- Etsy. I really like what Etsy is doing.
- icefox 18y agoSo far the only auction site I have seen that has gone anywhere is tfields.com which started as a transformers toys auction site and grew from there. It is a real catch-22, you need lots of buyers and sellers suddenly.
- noodle 18y agomy initial thoughts on how to make that happen would be to round up some medium-sized ebay sellers, ask them what their needs are, build the site to meet them, and offer them free auctions for a period of time to switch and help promote.
- ssharp 18y agoI think the best model to beat ebay is to create a "Ning" style auction site where you have separate auction sites dependent on the community that they target. The best strategy for a startup to topple a massive corporation is to flank them. Hit them in their weak spots, grow, and eventually you might get enough resources to topple them.
- noodle 18y agothat is the biggest issue. they are the giant in the industry. their name is a word for selling something online, just like 'to google' is 'to search'. taking down that giant would be serious business. but its a giant that can be taken down, and would be seriously worthwhile to do so.
- sachinag 18y agoMan, if only someone was going after them, one step at a time. Oh wait. http://www.dawdle.com http://www.dawdle.com The self-pimping done, you're being too narrow in terming it "online auctions". Auctions don't make a ton of sense for the vast majority of items sold online - they're only really useful for unique stuff. That's why they're moving towards Amazon's fixed price model. The problem with fixed price is that it's a "take it or leave it" proposition. Well, Dawdle solves the "take it or leave it" issue by letting potential buyers name their own price with our StandingOffer technology. First video games and gear, then the world! MWA HAHAHAH AHA !!!!!!1eleventy-seven
- yan 18y agoYou mentioned it, but I think the music industry is really ripe for disruption. Their business model is definitely shifting as we speak. ebay/auction sites/local commerce can be done better.
- icefox 18y agoThe problem is that everyone knows that the music world is changing and wants in on the pie and so far Apple has done the best job. The bad part is that they are doing a pretty good job. The hardware is nice and works, the software for the most part does work and gets music easily and cheap to users who are for the most part happy. A high obstacle. Let others try attacking the music problem and instead try one of the easier ones.
- yan 18y agoThat's assuming that the current lone model of "searchable mp3 catalog online for $ per song." There are many different ways to profit from music: artist interaction, live venues, merchandise, provide a quality recommendation/review service, etc. The current market is skewed heavily towards what the content that the industry thinks will sell, which receives the bulk of marketing. Not to mention the fact that the market naturally segments into people of varying levels of interest. People who love music and people who just care about the Top40 can be catered towards by very different business models.
- icefox 18y agoThe biggest thing I fear about music is that it is emotional. People want to be in a band and will work for less then minimum wage while living out of a van so they can maybe make it big, but really just to play music. Combined with the fact that in the mind of the consumer a song is near worthless means that the money has to either come from selling massive quantities, aka iTunes and they only break even or something else. And everything that is something else that I have heard of isn't that revolutionary.
- mojombo 18y agoClassifieds. CraigsList is not the be-all end-all of buying/selling things locally online. It may be a tough nut to crack, but it won't be hard to radically improve upon their horrible user experience. I would love to see some competition in this space.
- eli 18y agoPosting a classified ad is only as useful as the number of interested parties who read it. Your new site would have to be pretty fickin' special for me to post my ad there instead of to a massively larger audience on craigslist Also, you can't exactly undercut them -- Craigslist is free for most categories and pretty reasonable for the others
- josefresco 18y agoNot going to happen. Craigslist is at that early Google period where everyone who uses it for the first time never looks back and is uber-loyal to the brand. A slick competitor with a great interface and new tools still has to climb that huge Ebay/Facebook-style mountain (no users no stuff, no reason)
- yellowbkpk 18y agoWhat about layering some features on top of Craigslist that are mind-numblingly idiotic to leave out? I'm thinking better meta-data for apartment listings, for example.
- mixmax 18y agoLook at a lot of big traditional B2B businesses. They haven't gotten much coverage because they aren't sexy and visible to the normal consumer. - ERP ssystems are impossible to understand for the people that work with them, and require an army of highly paid consultants just to get it up and running. - financial software for large companies doesn't allow managers to see numbers in real-time, is difficult to get numbers in and out of, and hard to use. - HR software for managing people, their interests, knowledge, track record, etc. in large companies. These are just a few examples off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more. The advantage of B2B software is that you have a very good income model. A SAP ERP system for a company with 1000 employees runs into the millions. There are customers out there willing to pay you by the bucketload if you can make something that doesn't suck. And most of what is on the market today sucks badly. This is an industry that has been resting on its laurels for many years, and is ready to be picked off by nimble competitors.
- russell 18y agoThis is an area that has huge potential. The problem is that the scale is beyond the capabilities of the small startup. I'm involved in something that might have the right model. My client acquired some quite capable, but rough around the edges, software from a supplier that went belly up. The intention is to fix the bugs, enable low cost (non-programmer) customization and spin it off as a separate company. There may be other opportunities out there to take good enterprise software public. The other approach is to take on a narrow vertical and do a bangup job, Grow from there.
- netcan 18y agoFor the purpose of disruption, which vertical?
- thinkcomp 18y agoI'm hiring people in this space if anyone is looking for a job.
- mrtron 18y ago
- jakestein 18y agoTitle Insurance. See this article from Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html Summary: Fancy this: racetracks that keep 93% of your money and return only 5% in winning tickets. They wouldn't last long, not unless they could somehow rig the rules to both forbid price competition and make the purchase of race bets mandatory. That's more or less what the title insurance industry has done to American homeowners.
- tontoa4 18y agoRequired for a mortgage, government protected, and 93%+ of the premium for profit/overhead. Wow.
- shalmanese 18y agoHigher Education. Existing institutions are selling inefficient and grossly overpriced products in an environment in which objective evaluation is hard to obtain and the status quo fears innovation. If you could crack that nut, it would be massive.
- katz 18y agoThere is another bigger one: College Book Industry. The current system is pretty inefficient. This probably differs from country to country. The current system here works like this: The universities give lists of subjects and prescribed textbooks to brick-and-mortar bookstores. They then buy the books and sell them at a huge mark-up. Students generally do not order online because of the time delay/import BS and many do not have a fixed postal address. Secondhand book sales are a bit of mess because it is not centralised, etc... There are possibly quite a few ideas on how to make this system more effective (esp. in countries in which the internet penetration is not that high but the cellphone penetration is).
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoCheck out chegg. They are going to / already are disrupting this market. I think they've saved me 60% or more in the past... over the used bookstore.
- Xichekolas 18y agoI used half.com all the way through college (ISBN makes it quick), but it would be much easier if the chosen textbooks were announced earlier (like you point out). Most of the time I was without a book for the first week to 10 days. The lead time issue could be fixed simply by changing University policy, requiring professors to disclose required textbooks X weeks in advance of the first day of class. One loophole I found near the end of undergrad was that the campus bookstore's website had the required books posted for each class well over a month ahead of time (so you could buy them online and swing by to pick them up). I just looked up all my classes there, copied down the ISBNs and hit up half.com or Amazon. Of course, this breaks down with last minute changes or additions made by professors.
- 18y ago
- russell 18y agoGovernment, Governments are being run on antiquated software created by giants of the military industrial complex. There are huge hurdles on the procurement side, but the opportunities of making a 10x price performance improvement are all over the the place. One key is to make the product highly configurable to accommodate the different laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Another key is to tackle smaller entities because they will be more flexible. Voice of experience: dont start with the California DMV or the Illinois Secretary of State.
- josefresco 18y agoGovernment. Now hear me out on this one. I think with new technology, and the push for open access to information (that's digestible) will disrupt the political system as we've known it. Doubt it will happen once things get 'back on track' financially in this country.
- spoiledtechie 18y agoIts already starting. Look at sunlight labs.
- gills 18y agoDon't mistake this comment as me trying to make this thread a political flamewar. I agree with you that technologies used by government are ripe for disruption -- and in my opinion the Senate and Geithner today pretty much guaranteed that 'back on track' will be years, if not decades, away. So this really is a good, maybe vital, area to create tools that improve efficiency.
- geuis 18y agoJob search. There are a ton of competitors in this space, established and startup, but so far its all crap. I've been looking for a new job recently and I'm completely dissatisfied with everything that's out there. Craigslist is still probably the best resource for finding tech jobs, at least in San Francisco but there has to be a better way. A couple of ideas have popped into my head recently about ways to really shake this area up and to make it into a profitable business to start.
- josefresco 18y agoTake the Markus Frind route. Go free and kick ass.
- tontoa4 18y agoWith adblock and ad sales down the paid model seems more palatable.
- auston 18y agoHave you seen indeed.com?
- bemmu 18y agoWow, Quantcast/Compete estimate their monthly users to be 6-9 million. Their AdSense account must be quite healthy. I wonder how they got granted access to the data from the first few sites they index.
- bemmu 18y agoTo answer my own question, of course job listing sites want their sites to be discoverable. At least monster.com doesn't even have a robots.txt file.
- webwright 18y agoYaw I was in the jobs industry. There's simplyhired.com and jobster.com ... 6-9 million uniques isn't really worth the funding any of them received, I don't think. They didn't ask permission for the data any more than Google did. Scrape/index/refresh/repeat.
- josefresco 18y agoHealth Care.
- njharman 18y agoHIPPA, medical records, billing, medical office automation. The medical industry is in the information dark ages and finally being dragged into relative modernity by the government.
- jgrahamc 18y agoForget medical records. What about an online health care expenses manager like Quicken. If you've ever dealt with many doctors, or more than one insurance, or just the US health care insurance system in general it's a nightmare to keep track of what's been claimed, billed, paid back, written off, reduced, etc.
- ciscoriordan 18y agoText messaging. It's been discussed here before but it's worth repeating.
- eli 18y agoThis is difficult to tackle if you don't already have a serious presence in the mobile industry.
- masonlee 18y agoThere are still a lot of innovations you can make here without replacing the SMS backbone wholesale. For example, users interact with user interfaces, not messaging layers. If you can get people using your interface, you can switch the messaging layer where appropriate. Notice Google now sending IM to SMS? At my startup, Borange, we send group SMS for free on the iPhone, and are working with metadata and a user interface to innovate around sharing social availability and impromptu invitations, one of SMS's big use cases. When the time is right (read PUSH for iPhone?), we'll migrate users to a modern mobile messaging layer, and keep our backwards compatibility with free SMS for interacting with the rest of the world. Check us out, by the way. We just launched our iPhone app and are looking for investors and partners who believe in the Matrix and major change in the communications space. http://www.borange.com http://www.borange.com.
- eli 18y agoYou mean like 3jam, Limbo, sms.ac, Zemble, Google's Dodgeball, Yahoo's ill-fated "Mixd," and a dozen others who are no longer around and I forgot about? Jeez, I truly do wish you guys luck, but group/social SMS is a pretty tough nut to crack. (I used to cover the mobile industry for a trade publication.)
- masonlee 18y agoWell not exactly... The work we are doing at Borange is more concerned with scheduling and availability than sending group SMS, and my main point was that there are possible strategies for migrating people off of SMS by including SMS compatibility. It's the lowest common denominator in mobile messaging, and you really can't afford not to include it to some degree for moving forward. Yeah, crazy dead heap there, though! How long until SMS joins it? :)
- CFS 18y agoThe largest industry that is 'over ripe' is the energy industry. In particular, electricity distribution. Creating devices that perform 'demand management' are nearly trivial. In Australia, the normal price for large scale wholesale electricity from the national grid is Aust $48 per Mw/hr. But several times a year the 'spot price' is over Aust $10,000 per Mw/hr. This is the reason companies have 'peaking' plants that only operate 3-5 days a year. There will be 2 main stratergies: 1. Owner / user generated power would be transferred back to the grid during high price periods. 2. Load shedding (automatic turn-off of power) would occur during high price period. The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid'
- anamax 18y ago> The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid' The grid doesn't have to be all that smart. It just needs to tell folks when the peakers are being turned on and off. And, folks need to be compensated for reacting to said on/off.
- jonmc12 18y agoRead the 'The 4-steps to the Epiphany' by Steven Blank (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705 http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...) Things to look for in a disruptive market: 1) The presence of the 'Earlyvangelist'. It does not matter if you can disrupt an industry if no one will realize the value of the innovation. This means finding real people at real companies and gathering requirements for something they will buy. 2) An existing distribution channel that is available for the new product. 3) Existing product positioning that you can leverage. As a startup, its hard to disrupt when you have to spend all your money on advertising, branding, or explaining what your product is. 4) Large existing market. The book has a helpful framework for analyzing markets base on some of these factors, maturity, etc. This identifies the primary constraints of market risk. From there you can work with the customer to build a better product, and if you are lucky the risk shifts towards execution.
- hotshothenry 18y agoI think the enterprise sphere as a whole is ripe for disruption, which we've been witnessing with SaaS and other web 2.0 applications coming out as of late.
- chris11 18y agoReal estate listings. Only limited information on a MLS is viewable without a broker. And getting your house information on one can cost 200 to 500, or up to 6% of the price. There are already free internet listings, but those can lack listings and information on houses.
- yalurker 18y agoSeconded on all things real estate. This is more of a legal/social problem than a technical one at this point. Websites like zillow.com make a real estate agents role largely obsolete, yet they still try to command a huge commission on every sale. Another poster above mentioned Title Insurance as well. I suspect over the next 5-10 years we will see major changes in this industry. Huge savings to home buyers & sellers are available if the bureaucracy and traditions can be broken and replaced with a more consumer friendly system.
- kapitti 18y agoZillow hardly makes the role of a real estate agent obsolete - first off, their Zestimates are no where near correct in a lot of markets especially Today with all of the foreclosures and short sales. Second, the process of purchasing or selling your home isn't any easier because of zillow - only marketing a home is easier. A consumer friendly solution is needed - when we purchased our home last year, the amount of times I needed to initial and sign documents and then sign again after changes and again when the conditions were met, and again when we removed the contingencies, etc - and each time Scan & Email or Fax it back to the sellers or a third party; it was just annoying. With all of the e-sign technologies and document collaboration, there has got to be a way to make this process easier, smoother and less archaic. We got our home for a great price, and used a real estate agent, I could care less whether or not the realtor was removed from the process. What I want removed from the process is the pain.
- njharman 18y agoThere's already many competitors and real estate isn't exactly an awesome market segment to be in right now. Zillow, Redfin is actually doing something different (replacing one of the agents and returning savings to customer). Methinks boat left the dock on this one.
- pudo 18y agoMost of the publishing industry, esp. books. This is somewhat contingent on the success of ePaper/eBook technologies like (but not) the Kindle. They still need to develop for a while (2yrs or so) so the displays will be fast, have good contrast and be able to display color. But even before that, we might see a lot more authors going online and developing new patterns of writing that are based on shorter publishing cycles and still lower revenue expectations. I don't know how this will play out, but I'd bet that the RIAA/audio industry would make an embarassingly good model of what this very conservative industry will go through.
- robfitz 18y agovisas / immigration. you're looking at $400-900 an hour for lawyers to point you to the right webpage and tell you whether or not your particular situation fits through a loophole. corporate setup & startup paperwork of all sorts. also housing rental contracts, contractor... contracts. etc. patent applications. it's so hard to find good examples and templates. i'd pay to have something that said "type your overview here", "upload a picture here", etc. college applications. they charge what, $50 per application they look at? save them time, save applicants money. and how many colleges would perfectly suit you that you never heard about? make school scholarships more transparent and ease the application process. keeping up with relatives. i feel a little dirty about this one, but i'd love to have a helper manage my familial relationships in a behind-the-scenes fashion. birthday email templates, friendly hellos, status updates, etc. although deciding to pay for a service of that sort would mean acknowledging that you're a terrible grandson/husband/etc. warranties & mail in rebates. they all turn straight into money and dealing with them is total bs. i'm going back to work...
- iamwil 18y ago"keeping up with relatives" I've needed something for keeping up with friends, since I don't have many relatives. While fb news feeds tell me what's going on with my friends ON fb, the only out-of-band reminder I have is just birthdays. I thought about this for a long time, and I need it. Problem is, I'm not sure if anyone else really does. And even if they do, people might not admit to using it, which makes for a distribution problem. Thoughts?
- menloparkbum 18y agoA birthday reminder? The guy who made Bebo also ran a birthday reminder service which he has since returned to. According to a TechCrunch article last year, it makes $4M/yr in fees. Back in the dot-com boom, the startup I worked for built a similar service. It was very popular. In fact, it was so popular we... shut it down to work on a sort of web-based ERP framework. WHOOPS! But yeah, there's probably room for another birthday reminder service. http://www.birthdayalarm.com http://www.birthdayalarm.com http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/11/whats-next-for-bebos-founders-back-to-birthday-alarm/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/11/whats-next-for-bebos-fo...
- markessien 18y agoTelevision + Highly accurate profiles of the person watching the TV at any moment.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoBlackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Blackboard sucks and could be easily replaced by hacking together open source solutions and presenting it in a slick package (like 37 signals) but tailored for college instead of business.
- conover 18y agoI couldn't agree with this more. I work with Blackboard's software on a daily basis and it is a aweful, unstable mess. The only problem is that Blackboard seems intent on sueing any competitors out of business using patents (see desire2learn)
- ibsulon 18y agod2l is awful in its own right - the University of Arizona uses it and I'm absolutely boggled as to how this software was ever sold. It's not terrible from the student's perspective, but the professor/TA interface is abysmal. It reminds me of interfaces from the 90s, before we had figured out things like going to the next page without a specific button to save the current page.
- Retric 18y agoI think some of these have been invalidated: http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-uspto/ http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...
- tokenadult 18y agoBlackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Absolutely. My son is a student in an online high school and has taken online classes from other providers. All the competitors in that space are abominably user-unfriendly.
- markbao 18y agoFunny you say that—I'm a startup partner with the submitter of this Ask HN, who linked me your comment, and I'm working on another startup that's trying to do that. Screenshot of general page: http://screenshots.markbao.com/bbcd72149092d041f5aa310f2f2d3758.png http://screenshots.markbao.com/bbcd72149092d041f5aa310f2f2d3... http://screenshots.markbao.com/c637d2dc73f4b51c5e74111b86d7ecc3.png http://screenshots.markbao.com/c637d2dc73f4b51c5e74111b86d7e... One of the biggest problems with LMS (USPTO Blackboard patent 6,988,138) is that they're often hard to use, so teachers don't use them. I'm trying to change this by making things mindlessly simple, and using words they're already familiar with (Attachments, like with email): http://screenshots.markbao.com/cecd9f592564abe2cd5cac2ae8060aa5.png http://screenshots.markbao.com/cecd9f592564abe2cd5cac2ae8060... It's certainly not to the caliber of Blackboard, but I'm trying to target the long tail who just want websites and not huge, bloated LMSs, and scale up from there. Release early iterate often! It's going to be charged on a yearly basis by school, which includes unlimited teachers, file storage included. It's mostly going to be a sales and marketing learning experience for myself. Let me know if you think there is a market for this in middle schools/high schools/college... contact email/AIM is in profile.
- blakeweb 18y agoFinance is another area ripe for innovation. There's a crisis going on, as we've all noticed, and one reason behind it is that businesses in the industry who were perceived to be creating tons of value turn out to have just been running intelligent people in circles. Here are a few thoughts: - information and analysis. It's still too hard for consumers and too expensive for professionals to get access to reliable and usable information on the state of companies, economies, etc. - sources of capital for individuals and businesses. New ways will emerge of providing good ideas and reliable individuals with cheap access to the capital they need to build businesses, buy homes, etc. Prosper and kiva hopefully are just the beginning. - payments and micropayments. Does anyone out there love paypal? Or credit card companies, for that matter? Should it really cost several percent to handle every small and large transaction that takes place in the world? And several percent isn't all that bad compared to transaction costs in some industries, like healthcare. Should it really take 10 minutes and require complete trust in the waitstaff to not steal my information every time I use a credit card at a restaurant?
- andyjdavis 18y agoBanking. Let me store multiple currencies. dont convert currencies but actually let me hold whatever currencies I regularly deal with ie Euros, US dollars, Australian dollars and Thai baht but it would vary customer to customer. Let me make and receive payments over the net similar to PayPal (act as a payment processor). Also give me a bank account number for people who want to pay via what they think is an old fashioned bank transfer. If you could provide me with whatever numbers I need so I can receive bank transfers in every country I do business that would be ideal. I dont need any physical shop fronts. less real estate and staff should keep costs down. Provide a net based interface and a card that works over the visa network and Im happy. Do NOT send me paper statements and ads for your latest attempt to take my money under the guise of being my best friend. The world could use a net-centric bank that assumes you are not limited to whatever country you happen to be physically located in right now. With its lack of physical storefronts this bank wouldnt be for everyone but thats fine. It would be a a bank for tech savy, international business people.
- run4yourlives 18y agoThe insurance industry is a technological dinosaur. Many opportunities here.
- callmeed 18y agoInsurance industry: I have a close friend in the industry and he says there are tons of ways to improve the application, binder, and other processes. Online learning: Large edu and enterprise players like Blackboard and Saba are due for a disruption IMO (I think the ball is already rolling on this). Schools and enterprises don't want to keep paying huge licensing and infrastructure fees, and students should be able earn an online degree from a combination of online courses (from multiple schools). Online classifieds: I know this has been discussed here before, but I'm of the opinion that craigslist is due for a disruption of some sort. Car buying and financing: I just bought a car for my wife. Even though you can apply for financing online, the entire process was a total pain. There needs to be a "TicketStumbler for cars" that includes a financing and insurance option. I should be able to apply for traditional financing as well as peer-to-peer (ala prosper.com) financing all in one swoop. It should pull listings from classifieds, dealer inventories, auto trader, etc.
- anthony_barker 18y agoAlmost any industry can be rattled if the power goes to the consumer instead of the vendor. This has happened with consumer products but could go to services etc. -automobile disrupted by cars from asia - oh shit happened! -book industry disrupted by self published electronic books -shipping industry disrupted by automation - happening -pcs industry by netbooks with no moving parts/cellphones -Windows/Office by Ubuntu/Openoffice (outside of USA) -power industry by cheap solar cells - pipedream -housing industry by prefab homes - pipedream -newspapers by online media - happening -drug industry by Indian made generic drugs - legislation won't let it happen -all driving trades (taxis, truck driver etc) by automated DARPA style cars - pipedream -most manufacturing jobs by cheap chinese/korean robots - happening -most farming jobs by automation (eg AutoFarm - gps/AI driven tractors) - happening -Californian/Arizona farming by cheaper farms in Mexico, Guatamala etc - happening -drive through order takers by voice recognition -Long distance by skype, calling card & SIP providers - happening -Business travel by HD Video conferencing systems - happening (Cisco + HP) -Telecom equipment by Huawei -Oil furnaces by alternative pellet combustion system (see Jon Udell) -?? -Military soldiers by remote controlled robots - happening -billboards by gps aware ads -interbroker dealers by cheaper competitors (ITG - etc) - happening - speeding ticket writing by RFID tag reading systems (UK) -various industries by the rental business (Netflicks, Zipcar etc) Candidates that will not be disrupted - Governments - always political and loath change - Unions - Near monopolies (Heathcare, Cell phone) - Religion to an extent