Growing Print in India = Depressed Internet?

Amongst the many things an MBA education aims to do, one of the most important is to acquaint the student with certain frameworks and concepts that come in handy to analyze businesses, companies and industries.  And one such framework that every b-school grad no matter which part of the wide world she hails from will almost certainly be aware of is Michael Porter’s Five Force model for analyzing industries. Probably, it is to corportate strategy, what Markowicz’s portfolio theory is to investing or the 4P framework is to marketing. Porter’s framework is a way of analyzing how attractive an industry is on a macro scale. For more, read this wikipedia article.
One of the “five forces” in Porter’s framework is what’s called the “Threat of substitutes”. A possible substitute for a product or service makes the industry susceptible for downturn or even ultimate demise depending on how much overlap there is between the incumbent and competing substitute and how attractive the choice of substitute is. In the technology world, we see substitutes wiping out incumbent technologies all the time. The best example of this was how the birth of the PC, which was (more than) a substitute to the electronic typewriter resulted in the death of the latter. Similar examples could be cited w.r.t CDs/Floppy discs, iPod/Walkman, Broadband/Dial-up etc.