Is Recession a Mass Extinction?

Mass extinctions in geological time have occurred many times, the best known is at the end of the Cretaceous when it is believed the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico was hit by rather a large asteroid causing catastrophic climate change through a dust created perpetual winter; death of the vegetation across the globe and the dependant ecosystem, including dinosaurs amongst other things. This allowed a new spurt in evolutionary change allowing the mammals to develop and dominate the planet. Did you know that roast chicken last Sunday was probably the evolutionary descendant of a dinosaur!

In business terms is the current recession a mass extinction and if so what evolutionary change will it bring for the positive. Things may well be dire at present but many strategists say that a good clear out is often good for innovation and creativity.

Will there be a re balancing of the UK economy now the results of off-shoring and manufacturing decline have suddenly hit us so there is no one left to buy the products at home that were off-shored. I always thought that off-shoring missed the macro economic point that if you sack the call centre classes in the UK then there won't be as many people able to afford the products in the UK that you service in India and the like! It might have been cheap and in mode but was it right for the country?

Will there be a new breed of SME businesses freed of the shackles of high  I.T. infrastructure investment enabled through new SAAS and cloud provisions.

Marketing has already been revolutionised by the web opening up a world that was once restricted to a select set of wealthy companies now open to anyone with a bit of creativity and a laptop; will this now extend to operations and service provision?

Oh, and if you here someone say "he is a dinosaur" tell them that the dinosaurs were around substantially longer than we humans have been so far; in fact a part from the unfortunate asteroid at the end, they were very successful for 60-80  millions years or so; we have only been around 200,000 years so far!