I suspect that within 5 years most of us will be out of business, working for someone else in this field ( managing custom installations for Bust Buy?) or in something entirely different. You can plan all you want but there are only so many wealthy clients and not every firm will be able to avail themselves of the smaller pool of opportunities.

The business model whereby you sold high profit/low volume goods is going, going, going. Pete Peterson ( Secretary Commerce Nixon administration and Wall Street guru ) was on public radio today warning that if neither political party addresses certain fundementals foreign credit-whcih as been financing our excesses to the tune of 2 million/day- will not be available and then we will be in for what he called a "hard or crash landing." This is called a monetary crisis where the supply of money dries up so interest rites skyrocket, and the economy crashes to a halt. ( By the way, although he is an old fashioned economic conservative Republican Peterson was as harsh on current Republican policies as on Democratic. The fact is that we are running a serious deficit and if not corrected luxury spending will eventually get hit ).

If that occurs-and no one said it is guaranteed but just very likely to occur- than the resulting pool of jobs available will be very much curtailed. But even if Peterson is Chicken Little, the pool of clients is changing to what some have called "early majority" types. These folks want reliability and value and could care less about sound or video quality. Model X over model Y due to superior programming possibilities is irrelivant to this type. Bose will be good enough - and priced correctly- for this client. Manufacturers want to move boxes and are lusting to be rid of us. Lutron was merely the first to go this route. We are too small and sell to few products. Sell 200k of Crestron? That is less than the discount retailer sell in an hour. We do not count. There will be specialty cleints. But the multitude of clients we have feasted on, many of whom were techophiles , do not exist in large numbers. The client that do are being served by the large discounters. Price and crap. Price and crap.

Although we have a ways to go, UPP is coming. How many here have boned up on their networking skills? How many know how to write or edit drivers in Notepad. Propritary programming languages are going the way of Latin and ancient Greek. How many Java programmers have either become independant programmers or have moved to other industires. My buddy the Unix programmer was offered 125k at the height of the dot com boom. He is lucky to have a job now earning 65k.

2 way touch panels will soon be obsolete, replaced by web tablets that do more on a standard 801.11 protocol. You very well might be better off with propritary gateways running on less crowded spectrum but cost, cost cost. Remember, early majority types want value ( read cheap ). They do not want custom programming save if you do it for free. The future business model, I predict, will see us become more like plumbers who do not sell any equipment ( save pipe or in our case wire ) but get paid a lot of money per hour to work. Or we will morph into techology consultants and try to sell design services. The bottom line is you had better have serious networking skills so get ready for those useless 2-4 hour CEDIA classes that wet your lips but do not quench anyone's thirst. The fact is that few systems are especially complicated to wire or install. Program and trouble shoot is an other story.

So business plan away. The future will be in labor, networking and server setup and maintainence, and/or in pretty CAD drawings and graphics. If you are not as skilled at sales as QQQ learn to play Taps.

Alan