From Fred Wilson’s blog today:

“My head is in the same place it was last October and November when “the world was coming to an end”. I think we are in for a bad 2009 and a weak 2010 and maybe a better 2011. I also think we are going to see many large industries changed fundamentally by this downturn.”A VC, Apr 2009

The most cynical analyst tends to say that we’re just going through a classic pendular effect and that it’ll all go back to how it used to be. I actually agree totally with Fred’s thoughts: for a lot of industry segments, we will not get back to what it used to be.

A couple of examples:

– Retail: high end luxury brands, outside of the very high end where prices never went down (Cartier will always prefer destroying old inventory than discount it), will have a though time getting back to the pre-crisis prices. People are getting used to get some of them cheaper or they just switch to more affordable products. The perpetual lookout for bargains should mean a lot of potential for all ecommerce startups that are surfing on that front (I’m thinking Stylefeeder, Shopittome etc.)

– Advertising: most of the advertisers (when they’re buying) are tasting with great pleasure the extra inches that publishers and media companies accept to do to land deals. The bonuses here are more transparency, more efficency, optimized performances, shared metrics… OVERALL: the need for any media platform to now prove to the advetiser its validity as an advertising platform. I don’t think that these guys will actually go back to the black box that was used before. That’s also good news for the internet (which is probably the biggest metric driven ad platform) and all of the startups behind such as BluKai, Simulmedia, Lookery etc. Behavioral targetting, because of its data driven efficiency, should also take off if it’s not blocked by privacy rights advocates.