Time to blog about something else besides politics. EuroTelcoblog opines that Internet and web publishing technologies are evolving in a manner that suggests a new Web-based investment research platform will surface to replace the obviously dysfunctional and outdated one provided by the investment banks.
"the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.
There is a business model here, and whether it’s the financial media who seize upon it (Reuters and Bloomberg have the infrastructure and a lot of data, but are trapped in a walled garden mentality and put their journalists in the same sector-coverage silos that the brokers do), or the brokers (I’m skeptical, because I think they tend to be dismissive of alternative points of view, risk-averse, organized in sector and region silos, and anyway are focused on trying to kill one another), or a newcomer (CNET or something that doesn’t currently exist), I feel certain that it is going to happen."
Makes sense to me. Furthermore, if true, it would seem to follow that almost any research-intensive business would be open to similar disruption. Wonder if Gardener, Forrester, Yankee, et al. have thought of that?