Maryann Keller argues in a column that the future of the auto industry won't come from entrepreneurial startups or from global consolidation of automakers. Here's her grim conclusion:

[T]he future of the auto industry will look like the past: Neither theory of remaking the industry will come to pass. Upstart entrepreneurs will never achieve the mass scale necessary to produce vehicles at relevant prices for most consumers. While the startups may pioneer the use of some technology, any successes will be copied by the large manufacturers, which have greater resources, including government support, as well as an existing infrastructure. The startups will fail or remain relegated to niche markets. At the same time, governments around the world will continue to prop up their domestic automakers (either directly or through domestic market protections), thus distorting natural market forces.

Making cars and trucks is a capital intensive business with high barriers to entry. It naturally benefits from mass production and economies of scale.

But I don't understand why there isn't more a more dynamic relationship between established automakers and entrepreneurs. Imagine if the auto industry had an ecosystem like the biotech industry. Thousands of startups develop new drugs, devices, and therapies. Successful innovations get licensed or sold off to larger players with mass production capacity.

I'm not an expert on the auto industry, and I know the market is different in important ways from industries. (The importance of the secondary market and the infrastructure for maintenance, parts, etc. is a huge factor that entrepreneurs in most other industries don't have, for example.) But do wonder why we haven't seen more innovation from startups and adoption from the mass market players.

For an interesting example of automotive entrepreneurship, see this post by Jeff Jarvis.

I've been surprised by the number of people I've met who, like I did, quit their jobs after the recession took hold last year. Of course, most people don't want to quit — or can't. For many of those job-keepers, the prospect of layoffs is all too real, even as the recession officially winds down. They want to know what they can do in the face of the ongoing threat, and my fellow blogger Daisy Wademan Dowling provides useful tips in her post "How to Sell Yourself When Your Job's at Risk."

But there are also less self-promotional things you can do to feel more stable when the future seems shaky. The methods I've seen work involve, oddly, a bit of risk-taking, or at least breaking your routine. By initiating your own disruption at work, you can make externally driven change seem less threatening. Here are a few small things you can try:

1. Choose a task to do your own way. Chances are, like every frontline worker and manager, you have at least one routine duty that you always perform according to a tacitly understood set of expectations. You don't openly question the method because it seems to fit the M.O. of the organization or of the folks in charge, even though there's no formal rule about it. Identify one such task and start doing it the way that you always thought would make more sense. The change obviously should not be something that amounts to insubordination or that would create chaos for coworkers. But in a climate where layoffs seem imminent, there can be room for small, refreshing changes of this sort. Your initiative might even be praised. And if it isn't noticed at all, you'll have at least shown yourself that change wasn't as risky as it had initially seemed to be.

2. Rethink your order of operations. Organizing your workday is obviously more of an art than a science. You've probably settled into a particular pattern because it fit the bill when you started the job or because it was just easy to adopt. But when your pattern is threatened by external disruption, you can mitigate anxiety if you shake up your own world before it's shaken up for you, even if at first that seems like a hassle. Change the sequence of things you do each day, and feel what it's like to inhabit a new, self-authored routine. If your job is one that requires reacting to others, change the way you react so that things feel fresh to you (without acting fresh toward other people, of course).

3. Lay yourself off for a day. Ok, not literally. But take a day off in the middle of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) and inhabit the workaday world outside the office as an observer. The key is not to run errands or get some other practical thing done, and certainly not to sit (or work!) at home. It's to actively look around you and soak in the big picture when most everyone else is focusing on minutiae. The hum of the world when others are at work and you are not can be a liberating one to hear. And it can make the prospect of a layoff seem much less scary. Bring a souvenir back from your outing and place it on your desk or your wall at work. Let it remind you that you were out there already and that you can, if push comes to shove, go out there again.

What little things are you or people you know doing to cope in the face of potential layoffs?

Last week Google launched a new Google Maps feature called Place Pages. The purpose of these pages is to include as much information about places (which can be businesses or cities) in one spot. So for example (the example Google used upon announcement), if I search for "Burdick Chocolate Cafe" on Google Maps, and I go to the more info link for its listing (it's a place in Cambridge, MA), I will get reviews, photos, the map listing, directions, street view, and more.

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