Gizortnik,

Right here you conflate skills with industry. Then you go on to make astounding proclamations that totally miss the point.

You can buy a buggy whip today. I am sure about seven people in the USA sell them. As for the industry, it has gone the way of the dodo.

As for Watchmakers, the craft, it is today basically recreational. A person that design, machine the parts then assemble them into a working watch is more or less a unicorn. There are a few factories that make watch movements, but they don't do a real lot of design work, as they use mostly tried-and-true standard designs. Unless a company (like Omega) is very high end, they use standard watch movements which they buy by the thousands to assemble into watches.

There was a revolutionary watch movement design in the 1980s. The Swatch movement made use of self lubricating polymer parts. They were developed in response to the "quartz crisis"; which was the availability of inexpensive, reliable quartz crystal movements. The swatch movements required no bi-annual disassembly and maintenance, nor did they need batteries. They were "accurate enough" for daily use, and they were priced to compete with digital watches.

In general the efforts failed. While Swatch made enormous strides as a fashion brand, mechanical watches are more or less an anachronism, and they have gone the way of the pocket watch. Yes they maintain cachet as a luxury item, but they are worn as a status symbol to show that the owner can afford to waste money to own them and keep them in good working order. As an industry watch manufacturing still exists, but the craft of the watchmaker has vanished, replaced by standardized electronic components. The watch movements have been, in general, subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry.

As for transferable skills between the electric motor industry, which is also being subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry ... well there are not many skills in common. If you want a blow by blow breakdown as to why, I'd be happy to explain.

The point is that this is a revolutionary change. A mechanical engineer who has a second specialty in mass production and building production lines isn't going to find much work in an electronics factory unless they can retrain to program, understand and service robotic pick-and-place machines.

Just as the vacuum tube and all of the specialist glass manufacture basically vanished at the advent of the transistor, so too is happening to the brushed electric motor.

The modern synchronous brushless motor has more in common with a precision servo drive than it does to the venerable universal motor; and more to the point it is cheaper in the long run.

Yes, people will retrain. Good. Yes skilled professionals will have transferable skills. Great!

A revolutionary change will have repercussions far and wide. It is what the Boston Consulting Group calls a "Shake Out" of the market.