It generated 38 billion Euros in consolidated net sales last year.
"Digital Sciences is looking at a model where the local control of content-based services is moved out onto the Internet in a consolidated manner," says Joe Esposito, a publishing industry management consultant in New York City.
But, even before the current recession struck, the basic sales model for print media began falling apart: Craigslist destroyed the classified-advertising base, department stores consolidated and advertised less, and the Internet made the free distribution of news the norm.
With this announcement IBM is trying to provide a consolidated package of services to build Internet of Things applications.
"If you look at the years since the rise of the internet, power has become more consolidated, more elitist, less open to examination, so the interactive utopians have failed to deliver the power to the people they promised".
In short, 2015 will bring the reformation of a more enlightened and consolidated marketplace, and most likely a more enlightened internet population.
Facebook and other Internet companies have democratized content creation but consolidated platform control.
The Commons Work and Pensions Committee said it had "serious concerns" about how those without bank accounts and internet access would adapt to the new consolidated monthly payment.
If the Knight Commission thinks there's a problem with news and information getting through to the public now, just wait until the Internet and news sources become even more consolidated.
It has an obvious bad guy in the fat cat cable companies, but it's as much about the incredibly consolidated and monopolistic US telco landscape, and the geoeconomic aversion to internet regulation, as it is about wider, public interest internet issues.
