American Business: What to Make?

We all know that this economy needs new businesses producing new jobs, new products, new services, and bringing new capital into the economy. So, what kind of businesses are best?

My Thoughts:

Software and Entertainment. Now, if you've visited the link to my business website you may think that I am simply being biased because I am now, and have been, trying to get an entertainment software company off the ground for the last three years; however, we did not stumble into the industry by accident. Our long term plans span decades, and when we decided what kind of business we wanted to act as the foundation for the rest of our lives, we asked ourselves some very serious questions:

1. How can we create the most sustaining and sustainable jobs for the enormous glut of unemployed or underutilized college educated Americans?
Software development requires one resource above all others: creative human labor. By pursuing software development as our business, we can focus more than 75% of the total product development budget on creating and sustaining new jobs. The best part is that software development jobs are exactly the type of jobs that people want. They are long term, salaried, accompanied by health benefits as well as being intellectually and creatively challenging.

2. How can we attract international consumers who will inject new capital into the economy?
Software and Entertainment are the United States best sellers in foreign markets. While global reliance on software is a new phenomenon, the United States has been successfully profiting from the export of entertainment for a century.

3. What product or service can we provide that will be profitable regardless of global economic conditions?
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the entertainment industry flourished. Domestic and foreign consumers alike will give up any other luxury before they will stop purchasing quality entertainment.

4. What market can we revolutionize by discarding universally held, but incorrect assumptions?
It can be fairly simple to identify a market which is stagnating due to popular myths and the natural human tendency towards laziness. Just look for a product that's relatively new, very popular, and which offers limited competition. You'll find producers who are so happy with the easy profitability of their product that they would never dream of challenging the status quot or the false myths that created it. With a bit of research and common sense, suddenly you'll be writing a script for the first "talkie" and trying to convince investors that people really would like movies better if they could hear what was going on.

The poorly tapped goldmine that we have dedicated ourselves to tackling? Online Games. The potentially perfect merging of Software and Entertainment. Currently they are just arcade games mashed onto an IRC program (chat), but just wait until you see what they're like with color and sound (metaphorically).

Now, there is a universal 5th question to any new business brain storming session: how will we show investors how profitable our venture will be? Profit is the bottom line for any investor, and investment is the bottom line for any new business. How profitable are online games? Unimaginably. It takes less than 100,000 players to make a full scale online game profitable. This number is so easy to achieve that even games considered market failures still make money.

Sadly, U.S. investors in general do not understand the online game market and are reluctant to invest in such ventures. Therefore, currently other countries are dominating the market, and pulling those huge international profits into their own domestic economies.

But that's just my story. From my perspective Software and Entertainment look like the best possible linchpins for an economic revival in the United States.

What do you see?