Genius, madness, or an accident of exposure?

When the environment changes, players with attributes that used to draw little attention can suddenly loom large. Their capabilities, or attitudes, look novel even though they've been around for a while, working away at their niches. The current economic turmoil is like an environmental disaster that's purged the business landscape of its heavy hitters, but given more hunting space to lesser, nimbler, more creative creatures. These may be the “new companies” of the next few years, even though they are in fact well established, or are busy reviving business models from earlier eras.

But today, it's impossible to determine if any of these newly-exposed forces is a real candidate for future world domination, or whether it perhaps represents another evolutionary dead end. Take, for example, the CD and DVD buying company Musicmagpie. In a time where people are looking to conserve cash and are even giving away fewer goods to charity shops, a service that buys unwanted CDs and DVDs looks like an interesting proposition. I'm not going to say anything bad about them, and will quickly declare an interest: they're meant to be sending me a tenner, and I hope they enjoy listening to my mid-90s Britpop purchasing errors as much as I didn't.

Musicmagpie is like an anti-Amazon of CDs and DVDs, buying anything that has a valid barcode number and is in good physical condition. But I can't understand what the business model is. Are they going to try and resell the discs? If so, who do they think is going to buy them? Perhaps they just want to be the “bad bank” of media, sucking all the toxic music and movies out of the cultural economy.

The other example I've noticed in recent days is Miroma. Now, I'm not sure I have this exactly right, but my understanding is that Miroma is a marketing agency that will offset some of its fees by taking some of your products off you instead of cash. It's getting coverage at the moment because it sounds like a strategy for companies to keep up their marketing campaigns while tightening their budgets. The odd thing is, Miroma was founded in 2003, not 2008. A return to barter looks fashionable in a climate where pundits want us to believe that we'll soon be living in caves and eating cockroaches. But if a company is stuck with, say, an airfield full of cars that it can't shift, why would a marketing agency be any better at moving them?

These two companies have been revolving in my mind because they both represent the tragedy of finished goods. They are each addressing the oversupply of inventory and promising to supply liquidity. Before the economic downturn monopolised the brain cycles of managers everywhere, much thought was being given to sustainable production, and particularly the avoidance of overproduction. One of the aims of “just in time” manufacturing is to avoid building stuff that you can't sell and can't then decompose or repurpose. Musicmagpie and Miroma both seem happy to chomp on all this stuff, and if they can gain sustenance from it, then the very best of luck to them.