> salesmen, sales representatives, dealers

I still see a place for a person who is capable of framing product relevance. These positions will transition to more resemble marketing and support positions than the traditional wheeling, dealing salesman.

I know it's not a popular opinion around here, but selling and supporting products The Right Way(TM) does take a level of creativity that computers probably will never possess.

Then again, after a technological singularity, anything's possible.

"I know it's not a popular opinion around here, but selling and supporting products The Right Way(TM) "

People who have more time then money are fine (or must) spend their time to duplicate the knowledge of others.

I would rather use the money that I have to solve problems because I have limited time.

I recently needed a firewall for a particular application. I would have loved to have had a 5 minute conversation with a knowledgeable salesperson who would say "this is the one that you want it's $895". Instead I spent what seemed like hours on the cisco site, the retailer sites and more and came to no conclusion.

And by the way anyone who thinks they can just "ask HN" or post a question doesn't understand that at the very least having someone who makes money off you and might have to take a return on a product if your unhappy is generally a better situation then anonymous internet advice. Advice depends on specifics and interaction which means taking the time to listen and reply to specifics of somebodies needs.

That said obviously there are salesmen who don't understand their product and are of no value.

This only makes sense for high ticket items. For low ticket items, it's simply not scalable because being able to effectively frame product relevance means being about to truly understand the customer and his problem. In many cases the only information you have to go on is the customer's search query. Beyond the search query, all the other information necessary to determine relevance is effectively trapped in a buyer's head. Unless you have an effective way of extracting enough data about the customer's problem or need, you are pretty much S.O.L. when it comes to determining product relevance.

For low ticket items, the questions now are "How do we capture more information beyond a simple search query?" and "How do we further promote product darwinism and eliminate the influence of advertising, marketing, salesmen and other product misrepresentatives?"

How are salesman obsolete? Will a person that wants to pay 50k-500k a year for software+services really not want to talk to someone?

Yeah, the most mainstream predictions I've seen show sales adding around two million jobs over the next decade.

People forget that a lot of services are easily adaptable to new conditions. It sucked if all you knew how to do was to manufacture the perfect buggy whip. If you know how to sell something, it doesn't matter if it's cars or cattle or houses or industrial robots. Yeah, you have to learn about your product, but the basic skill set is quickly transferable.

They'll talk to lots of people. It just won't be a salesman. Its more-likely to be existing or previous customers.

It depends on your meaning by "salesmen", but in many cases in the modern enterprise ("account executives"), they're basically glorified customer support positions that get paid for retaining the customer and the ability to upsell. Same thing you get when you call the support line, except an account executive has a handful of customers to whom he is dedicated.

If you're talking about sales that functions primarily as new customer intake and has no long-lasting relationship with the clients, like door-to-door sales, I can see a better argument for that going obsolete.

"This includes salesmen, sales representatives"

You're casting a pretty wide net there. Why don't you try to duplicate what I've learned since 1996 (about domains) or what took me years to learn in other businesses by just reading some internet "how to's" and articles.

Let's say for example tptacek is selling security services. Would it be wrong to rely on his years of expertise or try to roll my own solution. I would pay for that wouldn't you?

You start out by saying "virtually all middlemen who do not add significant value are obsolete". Then in the next sentence you say "this includes salesmen, sales reps".

By the way value is also defined in different ways. The beer distributor (who is actually required by some laws) is the middleman between the manufacturer and the retail level (bar or store). The purpose of the distributor is also to get the store to push their products over the competition. Therefore to the mfg. they do have value in the chain.

Your entire comment made me happy, until that last line.

Large almost-monopoly molochs suck. Is it really the only way?

If I understand him right, it's a monopoly of perfect competition. The barrier to entry is the big capital needed to start. Think of Airlines, although it requires a big seed capital, it's very competitive and this lower prices and increase quality.

The market is competitive, but it's kind of monopolized by the big guys.

Airlines are horrible. I would happily pay 33% more per ticket to fly on airline that removed 1/3 of the seats (middle aisle) and gave the patrons a little bit of room. I think there's a place for that kind of airline if they market things well and add in a few other accoutrements, even though I believe just giving business guys room to maneuver their laptops without jutting elbow-deep into the fat of their neighbor (or themselves, as the case may be), will win you all the business accounts by itself.

Airlines won't do that, and here's why. As you correctly point out, the seats in the back of the plane are horribly, awfully cramped, making it impossible for business guys to manoeuvre their laptops without elbowing each other. This is intentional, because it induces those businesspeople who are both sufficiently desperate and have the money to spend, to pay for the much higher-margin seats at the front of the plane.

That's the main reason why flying coach is such crap.

So, you might think that removing 1/3rd of the seats and charging 33% more would be a revenue-neutral proposition, but it wouldn't be. Passengers who currently fly at the front of the plane would look at the cosier seats in the back and think "hey, actually -- I can live with that". Business-class passengers won't pay for seats at the front of the plane unless the seats in the back are sufficiently awful. Because the seats at the front of the plane are much higher-margin, the airline would lose money as a result.

(This isn't my own home-brewed conspiracy theory; this is based on reading Harvard Business School case studies. The things one learns whilst studying price discrimination theory during an MBA...)

Have you been on an airline recently? Clumsily regulated oligopolies tend to cause races to the bottom in terms of service and hikes to the top in terms of taxes/fees. No, airlines and ecommerce do not share the same destiny. That said: amazon is just another middle man- it's a marketplace with better information/ reliability. extrapolating competition into the future, other equally trusted marketplaces will arise. Amazons benefits of scale are not infinite, and I don't think amazons competitors need to reach her total scale before having similar cost structures. Tl;dr- don't count out competition yet, I doubt ANYTHING on the Internet is "winner take all..forever".

I think a big part of this is also using technology to eliminate products that shouldn't exist. If two products exist in a category and one provides equal quality (def: fitness for use) for less money, then it provides greater value and the other product is essentially noise and shouldn't exist. Marketers, sales reps, dealers, etc. all serve to prevent product and service darwinism. Reviews and recommendations like on Amazon are going a long way to render many agents of misrepresentation ineffective. Which is the way it should be.